To watch the recent television exploration of Discombobulationism was to experience something that felt less like art criticism and more like the witnessing of a seismic shift. The programme’s premise was simple: here is a new movement, born of the chaos of our moment, gathering momentum with startling speed. Yet what emerged over the course of the hour was something far more arresting—a sense that this was not merely a fleeting avant-garde curiosity but a phenomenon that may stand, in time, alongside the great artistic ruptures of the past.
The producers wisely avoided the trap of treating Discombobulationism as novelty. Instead, they presented it as a broad and surprisingly coherent mood, one that thrives on incoherence. Marietta Voss’s now-famous performance of ascending a staircase backwards in a gown of shredded instruction manuals while reciting emergency exit regulations in reverse was given pride of place. What might once have been dismissed as a surreal prank was reframed as a moment of origin: the point at which disorientation itself became not a problem to be solved but the very subject of the work.
From there, the programme moved fluidly across continents and media. Diego Armenta’s Tuesday Never Ends (Except on Thursday), a looping video where each day bleeds into the next and every sentence collapses into stutter, was introduced as an exploration of time’s refusal to stabilise. Leonie Krantz’s paintings, grids of classical perspective that slide into collapse before reassembling at impossible angles, were well described as “Cubism in freefall.” Rafael Mota’s olfactory assault, a gallery filled with clashing chemical scents, was shown through the reactions of visitors who stumbled out visibly shaken, the refusal of coherence made visceral. Clara Nguyen’s assembly diagrams that result in a chair without a seat were presented as a wry but profound meditation on our endless desire for function and the possibility of its denial.
What distinguished the programme was its insistence that these gestures are not random eccentricities but a considered response to the conditions of the present. In an age dominated by information overload, algorithmic prediction, and the constant demand that meaning be clear, immediate, and digestible, Discombobulationism insists on our right to be confused. It resists clarity not out of laziness but as a form of honesty: our world, fractured and contradictory, is no longer one in which sense can be easily made. The artists do not merely reflect that condition; they force us to inhabit it.
The show drew comparisons, inevitably, with earlier artistic revolutions. Impressionism dismantled the solidity of form in order to capture fleeting light. Cubism fractured perspective to reveal simultaneity. Discombobulationism, we were told, goes further still: it embraces fracture itself, not as a technique but as a reality. To encounter these works is to be reminded that confusion is not a temporary inconvenience but the state in which we increasingly live.
This is not without its dangers. The programme acknowledged critics who fear that disorientation could harden into gimmickry, an easy trick for artists keen to manufacture depth by withholding coherence. There is also the risk of elitism: when art courts bewilderment, it risks alienating those without the patience or inclination to embrace it. Yet the advocates of Discombobulationism argue, persuasively, that bewilderment is the most democratic of experiences: it happens to everyone, everywhere, without warning.
What made the programme so compelling was its willingness to lean into this paradox. It did not pretend that Discombobulationism is entirely graspable; indeed, its refusal to be pinned down seemed part of the allure. The film ended with a montage of exhibitions: maps that lead nowhere, staircases that collapse into themselves, blank books demanding to be read. The effect was disconcerting but oddly exhilarating. One left with the uncanny sense of having brushed against something both absurd and necessary.
It is a rare privilege to live through the birth of an artistic movement. Rarer still to encounter one that seems not only to mirror its age but to offer a vocabulary for it. Discombobulationism may fizzle, or it may define the century. For now, it feels like a name that will not easily be forgotten. And if the programme captured even a fraction of its significance, then it has given us something remarkable: the chance to recognise, in bewilderment itself, the beginnings of a new way of seeing.
