Manifesto: I AM THE COSMOS

Blinding ignorance does mislead us! O wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Open your eyes and see the world around you. See beyond the mundane, the everyday, the boring, see beyond the limitations of this mortal coil. See the world with full perception. Open your eyes to that which we don’t know, feel the oceans of imagination that flow around us. Open your eyes to the personal realities in which we all exist.

This so-called TRUTH we share is abhorrent. Vérité is my enemy. I am sick of the lifeless world that we live in, which seems to be the only thing everyone else seems to be so absorbed in. There is so much more to this world than what we think we know. There are no limitations. I am a divinity. I am a deity. This world belongs to me. I am the creator. Keep your hideous buildings, your dull skies, your decaying trees, your soulless inhabitants for I do not want you. I will not be restricted by your ideas, your perceptions, your realisations, your stunted ideas of beauty, of right and wrong.

There is no such thing as good or evil, light or dark, there is only beauty, and those to blind to see it.

I live in a scented paradise, a rolling tide of silk flowers and rosewater. The sun shines when I command it. My bed is a cushioned womb, dripping with blood and moonlight. I sit on a throne with a garland of flowers around my head and people come to pay me homage. I enjoy my existence because I have altered it, because I have taken control of it, because I can see the world around me for what it is and how it should be.

I am tired of people telling me about the limitations of photography. The only limitations are the ones you impose on yourself. If you confine yourself to the miserable little fraction of the world that we all have in common, then what can you expect? People tell me that it is a photographer’s role to explore what we all see, to take a second look, to present to the world what we already know with an extra layer of understanding or new perspective. I disagree. I violently disagree. Why on earth would I waste my time exploring objects and experiences that we all understand, why explore something that others feel when I have an entire cosmos of self left untouched?

I spit in the face of reality. I want to dream forever. I will survive this holocaust. I will not be swept along in this desert of nothingness so evident to me from the recent exhibitions I have seen. Is this the death of imagination? Why does fine art photography have to mean lifeless abstracts? What is this obsession with process and medium? I am a creator. The tools I use are incidental. I am a camera. I am a painter. I am a designer. I am a director. I am an auteur. I am an artist. I am a poet. Above all else, I am a poet. Every night I tell myself I am the cosmos. I will never stop. I will spray my blood over the walls of the Louvre. I will cut my fingers off in the New York Metropolitan. I will vomit in the Guggenheim gallery.

You ask for my carefully processed C-type prints, mounted on metal with an invisible adhesive with an accompanying text panel displaying my name, explanation optional. Instead I give you my heart, my body, my blood. Photography is not sterile. I feel as though the rest of the world has been castrated, neutered, spayed. I alone am susceptible to the transcendental orgasms of beauty and revulsion, I alone can perceive every aspect of a world I have created. I will mix my blood with the chemicals and the soil and I shall paint something incredible.

I will never die; it’s only the world that will end.

I am a narcissist. I am a Brutalist. I am a romanticist. I am a goddess worshiper. I am a Satanist. I am a classicist. I am a catholic. I am a pharaoh. I am a God King. I am a beauty seeker. I am a terrorist. I am everything I’ve dreamed of.  I am Christ. I am the Madonna. I am La Divina. I am the Sun.

I AM AN ARTIST.