Notebook: Pixies Prefer Pixels

As I was looking to Kalan for an image to represent Occupy, New York Magazine was busy casting him for a much bigger role – the poster child of a generation. The article -- “The Kids are Actually Sort of Alright” -- came out this month in NYMag with him on the cover and laid out the lot of American twenty-somethings. The forecast by Noreen Malone, herself of the Millennial generation she was analyzing, was cloudy with only the thinnest of silver linings. The pessimism was amplified by its proximity to the article “P.S. The world is ending this Friday.” More than the many statistics about joblessness (which fail to shock me every time) I was interested in the psychological diagnosis that was offered of us big kids.

We are: idealist, self-confident, floundering, hopeful. Despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that says we will fall short in all of the ways that our society usually measures people, we believe that we will succeed in accomplishing our aspirations – abstract and sweeping as they may be. We are alienated from the things we use. We live in a country that doesn’t make many things anymore, so we channel our impulse to create into crafting useless objects like art, crocheted reindeer and blog posts. We may be unemployed but we are culturally wealthy. We have more free, communal resources for communication, entertainment, news and production than we can use. We need less physical paraphernalia because of this. Our valuables are as small and portable as 1s and 0s. They are as transient as we are and as intangible as our goals. Sure it sounds a little like a hokey astrological reading. “You are passionate and headstrong. An unexpected visitor leads to financial gain on the second of the month.” But some of it rings true.

Let’s give our collective character form for a minute. Let’s call him/her Peter Pan. Now perhaps it is easy to see why Kalan fits the bill. A street performance artist, a transient traveler with his band of (lost) puppets, often outfitted in a costume of tights and secondhand ornaments. More oriented toward adventure and stories than a “grown-up” career.

Our generation is playful with gender. Our ideals of masculine and feminine beauty are conflating and more of us are curating our own gender from a combination of traditionally male and female traits. We have all of the sexual freedoms in the world but we are not necessarily using them, perhaps out of narcissism or because we value documentation and analysis over the experiential, or because the old ways of fitting together don’t feel right anymore and it will take time to craft new choreography.

There is a refusal to grow up and settle down with one city, one job or one partner. The Occupy movement has also brought out our drive to fight the pirates. (Those that take more than their share.) Not because we want to take their places but because we want to see the end of pirates altogether. Our fashion has embraced an aesthetic of the cast-off and castaway. To top it off, we can traverse our world in seconds – carrying messages, surfing currents of information and gaining great perspectives from our height. It’s just that, instead of fairy dust, our pixies prefer pixels.

Some new works on mylar that may or may not have anything to do with the above: