Tale of the Space Jesús- Practical pages

TALE OF THE

SPACE JESÚS A multimedia project by TUTOR : LYNN FULTON NOTTINGHAM

TRENT

UNIVERSITY

Albert Cruset Arrebola

OF

ART

AND

DESIGN

2014-15

TALE OF THE SPACE JESÚS Space Jesús may seem the most ordinary man of all, but he is much more. He’s a way to explore identity and pop culture, reconciliation between who we are and what we are supposed- and forced- to be. Within his original picture there is the will a zone, a mixture of the American dream, rural poverty and industrial exploitation. The exploration of the figure of Space Jesús, both through a sci-fi almeriense landscape and multiple narrative forms of creation and distribution, allows me to engage a variety of themes surrounding vigilance, imperialism and the multiplicity of the image while functioning as interconnected elements that have his persona as an anchor.

The theft and posterior rebuilding of identity I committed transformed a man deprived of his future into a mythical being echoing of space opera and post-apocalypse influences. In this game between the original identity and the constructed one the objective is not to find the truth, the real element behind the constructed façade, but to generate a question around the systems we live immersed in. Is it possible to create meaning?

Are we trapped within our social perimeters, which are unmovable and unchangeable?

Is that really fair? This investigation focuses on the ways new discourses can be made using the remnants of our social landscape to escape the destiny forced down unto us by the will of controlling systems.

The actions here depicted show an attempt to take our past in consideration when creating new elements that negate exploitative control. The tool chosen to do that is the hyperbole. By taking representation to the extreme and using a more comedic approach we separate from the standard currents and enter a different kind of narrative. It is a way to move away from standard narrative, creating an element so absurd that allows us to move freely in a conceptual sense. And since this kind of language doesn’t follow the usual ways of narration it forces us to dig for meaning if we don’t want to be left hanging, looking all miserable and uncool.

In the tale of the Space Jesús I’ve combined these ideas and explored the life of a singularly common man who did really weird and quite fascinating stuff. His actions encouraged me to turn it up to eleven, and thus this project was born.

Process- Context It is necessary to understand this practice as an ongoing element. Without any of its discarded parts there would be no final result, and I consider the way I came to the idea as important as the idea itself. Keeping that in mind, the final shape of the project came to be after lots of trial and error attempts. With each new transformation it would get narrowed down to more specifics thematic elements, cleaning up some of the ideas and making it more simple and effective.

I started off with the idea of a massive multi-disciplinary project that would be comprised by different pieces related on its take of cultural appropriation, narrative creation and the social landscape under the culture of vigilance post 9-11.

The project working name was Amalgamation, and it aimed to create different art pieces that could work individually by themselves and also as a part of a bigger element. It was understood as a series of shared actions, objects and written pieces that would attack the public space by subverting the techniques used by the oppressing forces. This sort of guerrilla approach allows the use of multiple little pieces that work interconnected through a common conceptual base, an idea that is still present in the current shape of this work.

To work towards this idea I focused on searching those elements that stood out from the bio-political control, elements formed around the brinks of the social element and that had grown and evolved unregulated. These distortions of control could be used either as inspirations or material to work with, starting points from where to launch a new counter-narrative against the dominated vision. The places to look were not confined to any particular medium; I looked for social movements, spaces left out and abandoned by the works of the government, fanzines, movies, videogames, work from various plastic artists, etc.

The elements that ended up forming my final selection were the following, each one developing a different practice of work and a different side of what I wanted to talk about. The abandoned town of Centralia in the USA, the game Slave of God, and Andrew Huot’s work Love letters. Each one of them was interesting to me in the way they touch their respective social ambient. Other interesting options were left out, like the Japanese ßber-gang Bosuzuku, but were susceptible of being developed in the future.

Sadly, the sheer volume of the concept ended up devouring the project. While trying to create multiple pieces I ended up making none that I found interesting, and it is only the process of realizing it that I can really make us as a positive element. These actions would end up changing and merging with each other, resulting in the appearance of the current stage in this project. It was their failure that fueled the Space JesĂşs into life.

CENTRALIA Places abandoned by the establishment are interesting spaces. They offer us a glimpse into a zone that has been discarded and lost its original meaning. After being transformed in ruins, these places often start generating its own narratives, normally related to its previous functioning use. The case of Centralia is singular in the sense that it seems straight out of a sci-fi novel. With a perpetual underground fire in the mines underneath the town, Centralia was evacuated in the 20th century for the safety of its inhabitants. The fire, now running wild, provokes the collapsing of structures, eruptions of toxic gas and a great increase of the temperature, creating hazardous elements that some people choose to ignore by staying there nonetheless. What struck me, apart from the post-apocalyptical landscape found there nowadays, were the messages people left on the road to Centralia, claiming it as hell on earth, Silent Hill and as an archive from people who lost their home and had something to say.

I intended to appropriate the space of Centralia as an offer of the future world, giving it purpose not as a shrine of human negligence, but as our final destination through stupidity. In a joyful way. The dystopian aspect of the town would allow me to use a sci-fi approach to create the duality of a lost future-lost past to reflect in our current society from an outside point of view. My intention was to take a pulp esthetic to engage a more emotional re-telling of the town, showing it as an alien place, terrifying but at the same time our inevitable final stop as a species.

The collective cultural hive mind already used Centralia in some works, the most notable of them the picture preceding the previous page with Carbon Knight, Centralia’s very own superhero spawned from the fiery mine hells beneath its streets. It is a fascinating creation, not because it’s gritty and a thousand time told superhero Liefield rip-off story from the 90s, but for the fact that they found it an appropriate material to launch an action comic. I would not have moved into that direction, but that’s a high bar to surpass in terms of creative madness.

In the end, this action was shelved to give way to the following attempts, which seemed more viable at the moment and by the convolution of working different paths at the same time. An image archive of Centralia can be found in the annex.

NEONIZE Drunken Disco night simulator. The interactive experience Slave of God is a very straightforward one. It takes place inside a nightclub where you can move freely through its premises. Your physical interaction with people or objects is very limited, applied only if you go to the bathroom to take a piss; an even then it is mostly an automatic response. But that’s not the key element of the game, the real font of interest in lies in ability to generate a meaningful space. Even though we mostly do anything in it, Slave of God resonates with us. Its neon-fueled visuals and blasting electronic music could be swapped with most of the clubs anyone has ever been, with faceless dancers trapped in their own unrecognizable body language and the detached-aware drunk sweet spot at the height of the night out.

SoG feels like a deconstruction of a concrete moment in the life of any party goer. It gives us the tools to generate our meaning within its structure, filling the gaps with our experiences in similar spaces.

My response to it was the idea of a work titled Neonize, which would make use of the neon stylization of the game and transplant it into the real world. I like to think of it as an invasion of the space, like moving the virtual interpretation into the physical space. It is, at its core, a forcing of subjectivity, a clash between what it is and what one processes, using the futuristic punk dystopian look of neon as a path.

The spectator would navigate the invaded space forced to rationalize its changes. Several collages and some experimentation with murals followed.

How did it fall apart? It probably wasn’t worked deeply enough. I feel like I just scrapped the potential of such kind of action, but I couldn’t find the right angle to make it work. A full transformation of the space, and not just objects within it would be more coherent with this approach. The direction I took with the creation of different posters and cards didn’t work like I expected to either. The pieces I was trying to construct felt empty from their creation, and even though I had confidence in the concepts, the practical aspects were not satisfactory.

DEFILING, OBEYING AND LOVE-LETTERING This discontent lead to the discovery of this piece by Andrew Huot, titled Love letters, and to the formulation of one of the key concepts of the project: defilement. I dislike this piece. I find it cheesy, corny and worst of it, harmless. And it led me to think about all the examples of feel-good art that I found around me. I have the belief that art should be confronting, and all this pieces one can find all around, like the dreaded Mr. Wonderful, are not that. They are accommodating. They don’t offer anything. They feel empty. They hide real meaning. They market happiness as an element that has to be forced onto us. That’s why the next logical step was to try destroying this anti-significance. And the way to do that was through the defiling of what those pieces uphold and of the pieces themselves.

Defilement, as Wikipedia puts it, is an injure or loss of sanctity. My attempt was to subvert the same pieces that fomented attitude by appropriating its form and changing its content. By defiling its original purpose and transforming it in messages of cynism it would form a critique to the establishment and the idea that we leave in the best of possible worlds and we should be proud of it. During these actions, I found that merely changing the format was not enough. Changing the text from the love letters felt stupid and useless. Like in the previous entry, I thought that I was aiming for a shock effect element in the pieces. They had no real value the way I was making them.

This follow to another piece I made, work name: OBEY. In that case the target was the Obey concept

by Shepard Fairey, whose attempt to brand creation became so successful that turned around its own meaning, becoming a flagship of mass-produced culture. In the piece I returned Obey to its source, John Carpenter’s film They live, and transformed its current importance in media with that of the alien lords that secretly controlled humanity in the movie.

I think of this Love letters defiling piece as a poor repeat of Obey without its focus and much more histrionic in its presentation, without the edge that the specific use of the movie had. For this reason I decided to stop working in this direction but still kept the idea of subversive pieces by tainting the major forms of representation. Simply put, I wasn’t feeling comfortable just yelling at a piece of media I disliked for no reason other than being angry at it.

BIRTH OF THE SPACE JESÚS After all this trial and error, I reached a stalemate in the sense I didn’t know how to apply these concepts in a satisfactory manner. I didn’t find that twisting a mechanism of control was an effective enough method to work with, so I started looking back to my referents to find a different approach for my practice.

What the previous failed attempts helped me understand was what I was trying to achieve, since they helped me narrow down what I found interesting and the most effective ways to convey a message. In those re-researching times, I came upon an almost forgotten article I used on an essay last year. It was about the current situation in Almeria, the place where the old spaghetti westerns were filmed in the 60s. The land, raving with poverty and famine in those years, became quite prosperous due to this business and started flourishing and creating a subculture based on the American films that took place there. Studios could do anything they wanted there, to the point of blowing up mountains to clean up space in the frame. But when westerns became a thing of the past film crews stopped going there. And they left a broken place, robbed from its future by a system that got everything they could from it and then jumped to another location to repeat the process all over again. The problem is that Almeria still holds to that idea of the western place. The fake towns and forts built exclusively for movies are still there, repurposed into thematic parks. People still dream of the old days when they would share a beer with Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. Their will is still carried out by an array of characters trying to keep that past alive.

This tale resonated with me. Attempting to grasp this past that equaled a lost future formed enough parallels with my situation to get my interest. And from all the elements of the article, one stood out the most. It was the figure of a man with sad eyes, sitting on a chair holding a bottle of wine under a canvas with Clint Eastwood. His name is of no consequence, but his actions and aspect are most interesting. Owner of a restaurant with its own Clint Eastwood brand of wine, and he is hell-bent in renaming the town’s street names’ to the ones of famous western directors, actors or movies. He also tells how he’s sent three letters to Clint, and even though he has responded to none of them, he’s still hopeful.

I was moved by the resilience of this man, and the absurdity of his quest. I am still not sure if one should feel pity or admiration for him, so I decided to make him my protagonist.

The figure of this man had all the elements I had been looking for. The continual attack of the system to impose purpose to a space, the necessity and struggle to stablish narratives to construct meaning -in this case when the system’s meaning has left-, the impact of pop culture in the social landscape. It also allowed me to engage in multiple ways the idea of defilement of the status quo, by targeting the whole Old West culture of appropriation.

I set off to work in two different spaces. First, the one concerning the story of the man referred as the Space Jesús. Second, the one composed of the works derived from his figure. In the same way he wanted to reclaim the figure of characters like Eastwood in the importance of his cultural context I want to uphold his figure against the cultural discrimination of a system that uses and discards as it sees fit.

TALE OF THE SPACE JESÚS Here is where the invasion of the Space Jesús takes place. Through the different objects created and distributed through the world his presence will be known and recognized. One of the main elements I work about is the multiplicity of the image. The ways it can be reproduced, repeated and repurposed, and how it changes through that repetition and a varying context.

In relation the process discussed before, this applies as a way to transmit a new meaning by tweaking its form and constructing a new narrative.

From there derives my interest in creating multiple objects within the Space Jesús imagery and its variations. The cornerstone of the project is given by the only picture of the protagonist that can be found, situated on the previous page. Take time to revel in its iconography. His combination with the mythical figure of Clint Eastwood was my starting point, and their relationship formed the base of the narrative and the core of the practice material as a whole. The other important point is the relation of the subject with the land of Almeria. The current dystopian state of the place led to the fabrication of a sci-fi imagery of the space with him as his savior; hence the title Space Jesús.

Even though everything said before, the project is still presented in a fairly initial phase. My main objective at this point is to experiment with the figure of the protagonist and use to expand its own narrative through the creation of different objects and its placement in the space.

The complete selection of works can be found in the annex.

ICONOGRAPHY This first group of work forms the base of most of the others actions, which are based on alterations of these ones. With the understanding from the beginning that the representation of the protagonist is inherently hyperbolic, due to the extreme plainness around him, it is necessary to surround him with a varied imagery worthy of the Space Jesús title. Following a path started with the experimentation with neon visuals, the background black and white scene is reinforced with otherworldly attire for the main character. Each sketch is an investigation around his identity and role in his post-apocalyptical home. It’s objective, to find the representation of the cosmic messiah. The techno-savvy, the cult leader, the war-lord, the adventurer… They all appear in order to give an understanding of a multifaceted god-like being.

Mixed media The final selected pieces will form a collection of 8 limited prints.

DRESS FOR THE JOB YOU WANT Created as example of the invasive element of the practice a found-object is used to bring forth the character of the Space JesĂşs. These two prints are based in the stencil from a fashion shop that proposed to dress the character for a contest. These alterations are meant to enter the pop domain and as an exercise about the channels to expand this figure outside the traditional methods.

Mixed media

Basis of the contest Theme: Dress the model; play with the color, the shapes, the clothes, prints and accessories.

Technique: Any type of crayon and pen is permitted.

Glued items, like paper or cloth will not be accepted.

Participation is open for anyone older than five years old.

ESCAPISM Another aspect of the project consists in totally turning him into an illustrative figure. The objective of breaking him down to a very linear and simple representation has not produced yet any satisfactory result, although it is a work in progress. The visual I’m trying to achieve is inspired by the murals of Shantelle Martin, and the illustrations by Gorka Villaescusa an Juanjo Saez.

I’m not looking for a faithful figurative representation, but a synthesized form of the Space Jesús.

Ink on paper

TÍO CLINT The bottle of wine in the hands of our protagonist is one of the biggest mysteries in his figure. Why is he holding it like a sickly newborn baby? What’s its real importance? Why does he pose so still, so proud? Does it really matter in any way in relation to the rest of the picture?

Here the wine it is played as a McGuffin, the filmic goal that in reality just serves to advance the narrative. The first use of the wine is how it is presented to us in the continuity of the story: an Eastwood themed wine, named Tío Clint. This acts as the wine the original man had in his western themed restaurant, and pushes the story outside the pages into the physical world as some kind of relic or an old remnant from the previous state of the land.

The design of the label follows the idea that it is a handmade element created by Jesús, hence the unimaginative use of the repeated face with a change of color to indicate the different type of wine. The back of the label features the basic information of the brand plus a quote from a few dollars more. The other labels pertain to gran reserva special edition and a very rare type of sake inspired by Sergio Leone’s samurai remakes.

The second version continues the circular idea of the multiple images by putting the figure of Space Jesús in the very bottle he is holding. In a way, it forms a closed narrative that works by self-sustaining itself with infinite loops of men with mustaches sitting in chairs. The design takes a more futuristic and minimalistic approach. The creation of these bottles works as a way to move the character forward, building from the first wine design into a tautology. The wine of Space Jesús features the Space Jesús. The object of mystery has now become the character itself, which is holding the bottle again. My objective with that is to create a non-lineal narrative that feeds from both ends while simultaneously creating a lineal narrative. It could be that the Space Jesús one is a continuation from the future of the previous one, like an updated replica of a godly object.

Mixed media

POST OFFICE Based on the very three cards sent to Clint Eastwood himself, these three envelopes replicate the action inviting the famous actor to town in order to share a glass of wine of his own brand. They contain an invitation letter, a picture of the registered Eastwood wine and one image of the movie star to be signed in case attending was an impossible feat.

This action works in resonance with the wine piece, by repeating and using an action made by the actual character in an artistic context.

Currently, this action remains conceptual, with only few test trials performed regardind the kind of envelope an Mr. Eastwood’s current adress.

COMERCIAL JESÚS This space is reserved to the commercial pieces of the Space Jesús, those works that can and will be sold in massive quantities for its insertion in the public space.

The ultimate way to find out if an element has been inserted in the shared subconscious of humanity is checking if it has been made into a postcard. Taking as inspiration a horrendous postcard with the cut-out head of Lady Di, here I attempt to keep multiplying the Space Jesús iconography by re-contextualizing its figure in a commercial element. The use of postcards allows me to embrace a full kitsch visual, navigating the limits of tasteful representation and mass image.

Using platforms as spreadshirt, I’ve designed diverse elements with the space Jesús persona, such as t-shirts, bags, mugs or pillows. These elements work similar as the t-shirt from the show and listen, presenting the character outside the conventional space of art. The representation, based on the previous illustrations gives too the idea of mass media and ugly corporate and religious imagery by repeating itself to boredom. So, if you have the chance, visit the spreadshirt shop of user El_cuatrero and buy some of the fine holy items there available.

Mixed media

S

GREETING FROM

almeria

FINAL REFLEXION Seeing the project as a whole and at this stage, I see it more of a starting point than as a finished element. I know this is just the midpoint review, but my take on these months has been based on experimentation and trying to discover a practice rather than pursuing a fixed objective. This gains more importance taking in consideration that it is what will count as my final work here. I appreciate this process in motion, even though it has caused the final stage of the project to appear kind of rushed since it is not an element I have dedicated a full semester to.

Truth be told, I have just started seeing what the full possibilities of this path are. The attempts presented in these pages are not more than the initial steps to get to the point where I can really start digging in the material. That doesn’t mean either that this has been a loss of time. Without all the previous try and error I wouldn’t have ended up with this work, and I consider the process a vital part of it, especially if it comes packing with failed attempts that help understand what one is doing.

Taking the final result of my work in consideration, I feel like I might have fallen again into trying to do a lot of different things at the same time and not really succeeding in any of them to their full potential. Still at this point I have many parts I’d like to change and develop more than the way they are presented here.

Over everything else, this project has been a learning process. Coming here I was faced with challenges in forms I had not encountered before, and had to forge my own ideas according to what I found most interesting, and what I found worthy of being investigated. If we analyze what I did here in Nottingham I’d say that an improvement has occurred. From what I say in the first tutorial report we see clearly that there was no fixed objective to work with when I came, it was an idea that kept evolving until it found a suitable form. My original intention to work with the public space swiftly changed to engage with the collective pop culture more than a physical space in the proper sense.

This change came after the moving on workshops, where I realized that I didn’t really want to address the space itself. The work done there, more akin with performance than anything else, showed me a style of work that did not resonate with what I was trying to accomplish and frustrated me. That’s what led me to discover new ways to work and new element to focus on.

The exploration that started with my first talk with Andrew came to a more solid form during the show and listen and its discussion, and became repurposed in the one to one tutorial. Making new things, discarding paths that didn’t work, ditching the purely religious element and going full sci-fi approach… Every part led me closer to do something that I could really get behind.

The same way the frustration in the moving on workshops was vital to the practice, the one to one tutorial became crucial in establishing that one could not rely solely on the shock or the strange to make something work. That crystalized in the connection with Clint Eastwood and it was really then when the work was then ready to take full form.

As a final note, I’d like to point how the pulp element was the only notion that remained from beginning to end. Both in the first and last tutorials there was the fascination with the extreme and the weird as a vehicle. The interest with this kind of narrative has given the project a style that came to full realization during in its neon phase, creating a very eccentric place that I hope serves to the purpose I intended it for. And if doesn’t, at least I expect someone gets offended by it. In the end, this is the worthiest objective a character like the Space Jesús could strive for.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, R. and Lavers, A. (1972). Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.

Beaubois, D. (1996). In the event of amnesia the city will recall. [Performance].

Chéreux, C., Fontcuberta, J., Kessels, E., Parr, M. and Schmid, J. (n.d.). From here on.

Dominguez, J. (2015). La felicitat. Fot-li pou.

Ellison, C. (2013). Wot I Think: Slave Of God. [online] Available at: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/04/slave-of-god-review/ Fontcuberta, J. (1987). Fauna. Mixed media. Barcelona.

Fontcuberta, J. (1997). Sputnik. [Mixed media]. Mixed media. Barcelona.

Graham, B., Roy, S., Dalrymple, F., Milonogiannis, G., Churchland, M., Ballermann, R., Bergin, J., Brisson, E. and Rios, E. (2012). Prophet. Berkeley, Calif.: Image Comics, Inc. Grimonprez, J. (2000). Inflight magazine. [mixed media].

Habarta, K. (2009). Bank notes. [s.l.: s.n.].

Huott, A. (2008). Love Notes. [Printed cards].

Lardín, R. (2012). Érase una vez en Almería. Vice magazine. [online] Available at: http:// www.vice.com/es/read/erase-una-vez-en-almeria-0000119-v6n4/page/0 Lavelle, S. (2012). Slave of God. Increpare Games.

Mad Max 2:The road warrior. (1981). [DVD] George Miller.

Mailaender, T. (2008). Extreme Tourism. [Mixed media] Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica.

Martin, S. (2014). Are you you. [Mural] New York: MoCADA. Memetro, A. (2012). Memetro. Barcelona.

Montiel, N. (2014). Imprenta móvil. [Printing, Installation] London: Hyde Park.

Niccageaseveryone.blogspot.co.uk, (2013). Nic Cage as Everyone. [online] Available at: http://niccageaseveryone.blogspot.co.uk/ [Accessed 4 Jan. 2015].

Only God forgives. (2013). [DVD] Nicolas Winding Refn.

The face of Bogart. (n.d.). .

Tiqqun., (2003). Theorie vom Bloom. Zürich: Diaphanes.

Villaescusa, G. (2015). Smegma radiante. [Illustration].

Why don’t you play in hell?. (2013). [film] Shion Sono.

Yang, L. (2013). Uterus man. [Instalation, mixed media] New York: Wallplay.

Yang, L. (2013). Lu Yang: Arcade. [Installation] New York: Wallplay.

SPACE I

JESUS