艺术家Wootha关于退圈的一篇长文和我的感想

以下为作者原文

For years you may have known me through a fictional entity called "Wootha". Today I have decided to destroy this entity. In this text, I will explain to you what motivated this decision.

Some major contingent events in our lives are like rhythms that, punctuating our lives accent after accent, remind us of our existence's essence. I recently lived one of these events, which I'm not going to explain further, but triggered this decision.

For many years, I have observed that existence is punctuated by events that have the potential force to divert our life courses from their linear trajectory.

I say "potential force" because for it to be realized, it must be accompanied by an effort of will, which, if it is applied with intuition, without fear, makes it possible to operate the miracle of creative destruction.

I decided to leave the art industry. I believed - or attempted to believe - that through entertainment, we could raise awareness of the ecocide's reality and perhaps help bring about systemic change through mass-narratives.

But I think today that the problem is precisely linked to a phenomenon of scale. Any desire to produce emotions, truths, thoughts, stories, art, desires, whose finality is mass broadcasting is part of the problem.

By this act, I therefore deliberately destroy years spent building a career in concept art, to free my creative energy from the restraints in which it was embedded and thus mobilize it in other forms.

25 years ago, I first consciously experienced the phenomenon of creative destruction.

I was 19, and after one of these events, I decided to go alone, without money, on Spain's roads, with only sculpting tools and a few clothes. This initiatory journey took me towards discovering what simplicity and renunciation contain in creative and regenerative power. Everything I am today is, to some degree, a consequence of this journey. Just like this journey was a consequence of many other decisions I took before.

Since then, though, whenever in my life I feel the urgent need for a change of trajectory, I go through a creative destruction process.

I have decided to be radical in the face of what I believe is the most perilous situation humanity has ever known in at least twelve millennia and the Younger Dryas end.

It seems to me that the ecosystem crisis we are experiencing, this terrible tierracide (a word invented by Glenn Albrecht to name the conscious murder of the Earth), can only be stopped by a profound change in our current civilizational paradigm.

I believe this change can only come about through creative destruction.

We spend our lives accumulating goods, experiences, memories, and recognition and convincing ourselves that we possess them, to nourish our sense of identity. We identify ourselves with all these possessions and believe that we are a sum that must constantly grow in order not to fall apart.

Like the belief in infinite growth in a finite world that nourishes our social order, we believe that we can continue to amass all these possessions until our death, the final event of a long linear trajectory that ends in ultimate dispossession. For a finite mind, the ontological perception of a linear scale amounts to thinking of death as nothingness instead as the end of a cycle: in a society which asserts that the universe is finite, the linear trajectory can only lead to the confines of nothingness.

This moribund representation of the world nourishes an insatiable desire for accumulation that invisibilizes the mind's infinite creative power.

We are collectively anchored in that very imaginary linear trajectory that will one day end into nothingness. It feeds both our compulsion for accumulation, which results in frenzied extractivism and our morbid tendency to strive for the destruction of the earth, both in our apocalyptic narratives and in our production modes.

Yet never more than today in human history as we know it, have we had more need of this infinite creative power of the mind. So many different futures are imaginable and desirable, and yet, we limit ourselves to considering a very small number as possible, relegating all others to the realms of utopia or entertainment.

If human responsibility for global warming is not unanimous, the tierracide - that is to say the premeditated, organized, rationalized, and systematized murder of the earth - resonates in our daily lives wherever we are on the planet.

Many people are tempted to take an extremely pessimistic view of the situation, or on the contrary, to deny it. Some believe that we can still "change the system" or that we need to bring life to other planets to preserve it. But if we take a step back, the difference between all these proposals is tiny compared to the infinite creative power of the human mind. It lies in the small delta of the perpetiation of the existing system that the philosopher F. Lordon calls the angle α: the acceptable difference between the injunction to conformity useful to the system and the individual's singular desires. The more we advance on the linear trajectory that humanity has taken since the industrial revolution, the more the angle α tends towards nullity, the more we anticipate injunctions and confuse them with our own desires. We, concept artists, only are "artists" by the name thrown at our ego, as a reward for our blind servility, just like we throw a peanut at a caged chimpanzee when he creates a new variant of the same grimace.

However, among the infinity of desirable and magnificent futures, in which humanity would change its current trajectory towards truly different possibilities, we seem able to imagine only those which fit in the angle α: they are encapsulated in the form of stories we call "fictions", locked inside the reassuring membrane of the "entertainment" realm, within which the desire for imaginary can flourish without risking to question the established social order which is responsible for the tierracide.

This social order, wherever we call capitalism, neo-liberalism, modernity, anthropocene or some other name, has become both its own cause and its own consequence. At all times, the α angle ensures that our creativity is channeled towards the linearity of the world's trajectory, and that no event is coming to generate some creative destruction that could result in uncertainty and disorder. On the contrary, when creativity expresses itself within this angle, it becomes its opposite: destructive creativity. By strengthening the norms and injunctions that perpetuates a tierracidal social order, it participates in the atomization of society, eliminating uncertainty, returning to order, and simplifying the living: it is the reign of Thanatos over Eros, of the death drive and the desire for nothingness.

Because that is what it is: the struggle for entropy.

The universe goes from order to disorder, from simple to complex, from rational to irrational, from predictable to uncertainty.

Chaos is life's inseparable ally.

Our collective creative power can do more than the destructive creativity that resides within the α angle. We can bring to humanity imaginaries of a vast multitude of possible, desirable, and magnificent futures if we come out collectively.

To apply this philosophy to myself, I will once again indulge in the magic of creative destruction. "Wootha" is dead, but I'm still alive and well. I do not know how this creative force that inhabits me, just like each of us, will manifest. I believe it will take a very different form, rooted in local communities, the present actions, and a lot of friendship and solidarity.

Thank you.

Stéphane Richard.

关于这位艺术家退圈我其实看完属于一种似懂非懂的感受。但是看到他在聊到大众传播和现代互联网娱乐行业对人们的影响，我在想类似在国内现在社交媒体上，我们这些靠互联网生存死画图的，除了打工服务给上级领导和甲方外，其他时候我们的创作都会积极的发表在各种平台上以增加我们的曝光度，这样我们可以收到更多工作机会和粉丝。

甚至很多很多人做作品是以点赞和上热门，拿奖等等这些纯粹的功利性去做创作，如果自己做了自己满意的作品在网络反而没有好的响应，很多作者就会否定掉自己。

那这种数字绘画形式的创作，究竟最后是以什么人什么群体为基准在评判呢？要知道不同平台是有完全不同的用户在使用，知乎，b站，快手抖音，微博，小红书都是针对完全不同的人群做出来的app，对于作品的喜好认知也是大不相同。

所以作为做数字艺术的创作人，除开纯粹的盈利工作，当我们自己的创作发表到互联网后，最后到底是为谁在服务？如果自己很在意点赞和好评的话，其实本质是依然是作为一个商人在推销自己的产品，而不是一个艺术家在进行自己和自己的对话，和观众的对话，和世界的对话。那为什么还要自称自己是艺术家呢？最终目标是做一个 点赞艺术家吗？

互联网让创作者互相攀比，仿佛谁的点赞和粉丝最多，谁就是更厉害的存在。就像是中国学校要做成绩单排名一样。但是点赞和传统绘画的大众点评其实是完全不一样的审美逻辑，因为画廊里的绘画作品好歹是买家，评论家，和艺术爱好者在评价，而互联网作品你完全不知道是什么人在对你做评论，而作者会被很多毫不相关的人的评论影响自己。这是一件很恐怖的事情。

然而这种事情作为互联网创作者是不能避免的，因为cg艺术的商业属性是非常强的，是完全不能作为架上绘画放在画廊里卖的。只能非常廉价的放在互联网媒体上接受所有人评论。

写到这里我想到，就像音乐人一样，搞嘻哈的，批判社会的很多都发财了。真正批判社会的都去搞摇滚，然后自杀了。如果选择做cg艺术，其实就是选择了一条商业属性非常强的路，其实没有几个cg艺术家真的有资格成为真正的艺术家，只是有一部分人把自己非要包装一下罢了。也就是设计师行业和艺术家行业的本质区别，为谁服务的问题，谁来批判的问题。

2022 11-19