RYAN BREWER


(Editor's Note: Disposable Creatures -- in its entirety -- was at the very core of our inspiration when piecing together this issue of At-Large Magazine, although only a few striking fragments were needed for our cover.)


Welcome to the Jungle


"Self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." --Walter Benjamin


Initially inspired by the gruesome dystopia of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, (recall the swine wood-chipper, if you must), I recently -- and coincidentally -- came across a well of harsh imagery that would apply perfectly to the direction of this project. Thanks to a local uprising in animal rights activism, I have acquired enough gory pamphlets to inspire nightmares for months to come. One such image, particularly poignant in its horrific way, is a photograph of a hallway of "battery cages," a term for a seemingly medieval confinement system, primarily functioning as birthing prisons for hens. Their offspring become products for our consumption and thus the line between agriculture and consumer culture becomes blurred.


Consumption, appropriately enough, is the driving force of my quest to understand and illustrate the power (and powerlessness) of mass culture with the prowess of media culture, the thesis for my vision of Disposable Creatures. It becomes interesting and difficult to identify and articulate the exact relationship -- much like the question of the chicken and egg. While control is very much a binding element, exactly who plays the role of dictator? For me, the only clues lie in the image- a telling byproduct of pop culture, manufactured by the individual and the mass media alike. Stuart Ewan, historian and author of the essay "Note for the New Millennium: Is the Role of Design to Glorify Corporate Power?" has documented and commented on the role of the image extensively:


"Mass imagery...is a powerful component of how we've come to understand and envision the meaning of democracy. Images also influence the ways in which individuals establish a sense of personal identity. In the United States, where most people live anonymously as part of a mass audience, the prospect of being projected into the spectacle, of becoming an image, represents society's highest kind of acclaim."


The concept of the individual desiring and (albeit rarely) becoming an image or an icon, is a new, disturbingly unavoidable drive, instilled in us by the media and encouraged by the surrounding individuals forming mass culture, present in our everyday lives. Perhaps we similarly encourage. Regardless, (to resurrect more Animalia-inspired analogy), this condition mirrors that of the Moth and the Flame. Since the dawn of the entertainment industry, the role of fame and iconography has become cyclic. Individuals rise from the masses, are commodified through the mass projection of the artificial image they represent, and by becoming the house-hold name (or image) through which they are exploited, the corporations for whom they ultimately represent dispose of them accordingly. Money-making icons are born as rapidly as Battery Cage offspring. Perhaps, too, these human images meet their demise at the hands of us, the consumer, through the murderous drives that we mask as mere boredom or worse, the encouragement of utterly devastating failure through public disdain: documented, exacerbated and exploited throughout tabloid rags, scandals and tragedies subside and are forgotten -- until the insidious cycle repeats itself.


Savage as it may be, I have chosen tragic characters to partially glorify, as well as exploit, for the sake of providing example and shedding light on this culture-consumption paradigm. From mainstream performers such as Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe, to those who similarly suffered on the fringe of pop culture such as Anna Nicole Smith and Edie Sedgwick, we can see death is the final consumer. And Britney Spears, too -- her sensational demise is our current intrigue. Perhaps she is next to go...and would we not love that? These commodified creatures are as disposable as the peeled egg shell, and as fragile as the rest of us, which perhaps is the heart of our comfort in their downfall.


"...The range of human possibility is being incrementally narrowed to that which is for sale. With nearly all forms of visual expressionÑeven the fine artsÑreduced to the status of commodities, our ability to learn from such expressions, to make sense of our world through them, is diminished. As our line of sight is drawn further into the market of images, democratic choice is reduced to window-shopping for disposable impressions. History itself is reduced to a consumable parade of visual clichŽs, and the social forces that drive it are rendered less and less comprehensible." --Stuart Ewen, from "Note for the New Millennium"