Rebecca’s Automatist Exercise #7/8

This “get out of your media-polluted brain” exercise was meant to let ourselves free and to be impervious to everything around us. I, however, wonder if this is even attainable because both our surroundings and the media influence most of what we do or say. Is it possible to forget about what society expects of us and follow our own paths? Either way, everything we had put on this piece of paper was influenced somehow by consumerism. All four squares aren’t conceptually similar, however, they do relate by which all images and words weren’t formed through individuality rather instruction.

I will begin by talking about the first square, where we were told to draw shapes that define a certain word. The first square looks rather thought out and made to be something both abstract and appealing. The person who drew the first square may have wanted to make something beautiful out of it because he or she thought that that was expected of him or her as an art student. The second square (to the left) has words that describe one’s first memory. Here the person went straight to the point and used words that allow the viewer to understand what had happened during this memory. However, I wonder if he or she had done this because he knew someone was going to read it and felt the need to be as direct as possible. In the third square, we were told to draw a representation of all the medicine we had taken in our lives. Our ideas about medication and the sometime negative aspects to it are always presented in the media and the artist who drew the medicine bottle and tallies was most likely affected by societies’ view of medicine. Finally, the fourth square was the one I had made. We had to write down the words we thought of when we saw a certain shape. I believe this part was most affected by my exposure to the media or consumerism. Almost everything I had imagined when we saw each shape was created by the images I have been exposed to in my environment.

All four boxes were shaped by what is expected of us and while this was a totally free exercise, we still couldn’t stray away from everything that influences us. In Culture Jam, Lasn talks about how society is essentially controlled by consumerism whereas we are told what to consume and how to think. Lasn wants us to stop depending on corporations and the media. This much relates to the ideas of Dadaism where Dadaism is anti-war movement that deviates away from the traditional in order to make certain statements. Dada art denounces society and reveals the world as it is without trying to change peoples’ ideals. Lasn also tries to do this within his book. To go alongside the ideas of Dadaism and Lasn, what were to happen if we were totally unaffected by consumerism and what the world expects of us? What would be in these four squares? Whatever would be drawn, these four boxes would have been completely uninfluenced, therefore are shaped by our own independent beliefs.

Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New York: Eagle Brook, 1999