By Hackson Jollock
I read Mr. Artimus Crankshaft’s review of my exhibition, Ctrl+Z My Soul, with a mix of weary amusement and cautious optimism — the latter arising from the hope that even the most reactionary voices might inadvertently signal that the work is, in fact, hitting a nerve.
Crankshaft dismisses my canvases as “digital scribbles,” a phrase that neatly encapsulates his fundamental misunderstanding — not only of my work, but of the evolving language of contemporary visual culture. To scorn digital mark-making as somehow inferior to analog gesture is to reveal a nostalgia clinging tightly to an increasingly irrelevant hierarchy of mediums. The “scribble,” digital or otherwise, has a long lineage in art history — from Cy Twombly’s asemic scrawls to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s frenetic semiotics. My interventions are merely situated in the 21st century’s visual vernacular: the gesture of the stylus, the glitch of compression, the poetry of error.
He compares my work unfavourably to that of Jackson Pollock, but I do not pretend to drip paint in heroic abstraction. There is hardly any similarity between our bodies of work. Where Pollock used the body to express the unconscious, I use the interface to expose the digital psyche — fractured, flattened, and relentlessly mediated.
Crankshaft scoffs at my use of Comic Sans, calling it a “typographic middle finger.” Here, at least, we agree. Typography, especially in a digital context, carries semiotic weight; the use of Comic Sans, far from being naïve, is a deliberate subversion — a challenge to taste, to aesthetic elitism, and to the sanctity of the “serious” font. One might as well criticise Duchamp for choosing the wrong urinal.
The title “Existential Yoghurt”, which he gleefully mocks, is meant to evoke the absurdity of applying linguistic labels to transient digital experiences — it is a commentary on how meaning curdles under the weight of relentless naming and categorisation. That he reads this as pretension, rather than provocation, says more about the limits of his interpretive lens than the work itself.
Ultimately, Mr. Crankshaft is entitled to dislike my work. Discomfort, even ridicule, is part of the artistic contract when one ventures into new visual territories. But let us be clear: his discomfort is not evidence of my failure — it is the very terrain I seek to explore.
If the critic finds only chaos where others see complexity, then so be it. I will continue to interrogate the line between gesture and glitch, image and interface, irony and sincerity. The canvas has not died — it has merely been uploaded.
Hackson Jollock
Digital Formalist, Reluctant Neo-Expressionist and Unapologetic Fine Art Agitator
