Williem Encarnacion
This year was unlike any other and yet I still feel like that is an understatement for what has happened in 2020. The deaths of Kobe Bryant, Pop Smoke, Chadwick Boseman, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, barely even recap the year. 2020 will forever be remembered as the year the world shut down. Covid-19 completely disrupted our daily lives and also ended others. 2020 was tragic.
In the midst of a pandemic, we were all mandated to take classes remotely. While stuck at home for the entirety of my Sophomore fall semester, I was tasked with creating this final art project that encapsulated all my notes and thoughts that had occurred in this class. I thought to myself, how was I going to do that, and let alone manifest my thoughts into art.
Well, the idea of my project was born just a couple of classes in. Listening to composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy in class and reading reviews of critics made me wonder if the class of Experimental Arts was all about listening to what people thought was trash. Over time, this idea developed into the reception of the artwork being trash and not the work itself. I was so fascinated by this idea of trash and how I could relate this idea to today.
Going back to the beginning of the pandemic, there was nothing to do but yet it seemed like everything was going on at the same time. All I could do was watch Coronavirus Briefings, watch US outrage over racial injustice, and just see and hear all the negativity that surrounded the United States. Essentially, everyday I learned something new, read something different, and heard different views on the same topics, and it made me realize how much I hated politics.
I never felt strongly about being a Democrat or Republican but about what is right and what is wrong. The line can’t be blurrier than it is right now. And that’s what I hate. Everything about right or wrong became left or right and that’s not the way things should be. Ultimately, 2020 showed me how trash politics are.
Enter Dada, Marcel Duchamp’s investment into the future, the World Wars, and the Great Depression. Those people, events, and movements shaped my project about the 2020 Pandemic and my belief that America could be better. Like today, those events were new to everyone and no one knew how to deal with it and Marcel Duchamp had envisioned a better future because the present just wasn’t good enough to understand his art. Seemingly I checked off every box for this project: the transformation of my thoughts and also the connection to this class. The only thing I didn’t know yet was the how. How was I going to present my ideas?
For this project, I decided to challenge myself and take on this topic of politics as trash. I thought of doing videos or maps, but, ultimately, I decided to write a kind of political commentary or journal. I didn’t want to cover this like it was news, I just wanted to share what was going on in the mind of a 19 year old who, in his first election, had to choose between Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kanye West for President.
With writing, I felt like I had complete control of my direction and tone. I just wanted to expose the true reality of the world we live in today so I wanted this to be as radical as it could be like one of those manifestos we read in class about art. The goal was to expose that the politics people believe in are not what they’re supposed to be. I wanted people to feel triggered that they had to hear the opposite of their beliefs and I wanted them to realize the truth that 2020 revealed.
But I couldn’t. As I started writing this project, I wanted people, off the bat, to feel a certain way by writing too far left or too far right, but I couldn’t bring myself to write things I couldn’t take seriously or didn’t truly believe. I felt defeated in a sense because I couldn’t quite do my project the way I envisioned it. I never knew this about myself. I never knew I had difficulty in writing how I wanted to, but it happened. Ultimately, I had to go in a slightly different direction. However, something about experimental art occurred in my head. I learned that artists don’t have a vision of creating trash, you actually can’t create garbage, which was what I was trying to do. In the end, the process proved difficult but I still really liked how this ended up.
My message became that we live in trash because our politics are trash. No help is coming in 2021 and I wanted people to see that the future is the key to our society’s success. The political victories or losses meant nothing when the society around us is not all on board. I am not the most politically informed person out there and you may not like what I have to say. I don’t agree with everything I wrote. I just wanted to provoke a certain response where people can kind of hopefully see what I see, that everything is trash. I wanted to show there were lots of underlying issues to the biggest issues of 2020. My mission is that I hope you don’t like my project because you don’t like what I wrote. If you hated what I wrote, mission accomplished. But my project is not trash, your reception of it is.
I think people may have a hard time digesting that change isn’t coming because their political candidate won. People have been trained to believe in politics being the change but that is far from the truth. Nothing will get better anytime soon if people don’t open their eyes and see what’s really going on. We all need to realize that WE are the change and not them. It is only when we change ourselves that we see real change. I hope to have people realize this so that the false hope they’re feeling now can become real hope in the future. Overall, politics are trash, and as a result, America is trash. If you expect 2021 to change that, you’re in for a long year.