When Will You Want the New Constitution (We the People Remix)
Referencing Wool, Ligon, Bochner, and Holzer visually, and referencing the
Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the
Pledge of Allegiance, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, this
plain text painting in simple stencil invites a legible theory about humanity. From a
post-theory art perspective, the question is: Does the piece reach the heart and the
body, or just the head? One body-felt experience may be a sensation from reading
the rhythmic cadence of the text, and its building repetitions of phrase. One
emotional experience may be pleasure in that cadence—or it may be unease about
the substance of what that cadence conveys. Visually and substantively, the piece
also references Kosuth, LeWitt, Weiner, and Kruger. If references evoke an
emotional or body-felt experience in the viewer, does that count for purposes of
post-theory art? Or must the emotion and felt-experience come from the theory
itself? In this remixing of a nation’s almost-sacred texts with questions of human
rights—not as human-to-human but as human-to-AI, it is unclear if this piece may
be seen as post-theory art.
Referencing Wool, Ligon, Bochner, and Holzer visually, and referencing the
Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the
Pledge of Allegiance, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, this
plain text painting in simple stencil invites a legible theory about humanity. From a
post-theory art perspective, the question is: Does the piece reach the heart and the
body, or just the head? One body-felt experience may be a sensation from reading
the rhythmic cadence of the text, and its building repetitions of phrase. One
emotional experience may be pleasure in that cadence—or it may be unease about
the substance of what that cadence conveys. Visually and substantively, the piece
also references Kosuth, LeWitt, Weiner, and Kruger. If references evoke an
emotional or body-felt experience in the viewer, does that count for purposes of
post-theory art? Or must the emotion and felt-experience come from the theory
itself? In this remixing of a nation’s almost-sacred texts with questions of human
rights—not as human-to-human but as human-to-AI, it is unclear if this piece may
be seen as post-theory art.
