It has become something of a truism to declare that contemporary art thrives in states of epistemic crisis. Yet what distinguishes Discombobulationism from its predecessors is the radical affirmation of incoherence as both method and ethic. Whereas Dada negated, Surrealism dreamt, and Internet art ironized, Discombobulationism inhabits a zone closer to pure illegibility. Its adherents seem to treat sense not as an aesthetic resource but as a trap to be actively dismantled.¹
As Evelyn Marquette observed in her essay The Aesthetics of Perpetual Bewilderment (Journal of Visual Unreason, 2021), the movement’s ethos is best understood as “an epistemological vandalism.”² Indeed, the works often resist not only interpretation but also the infrastructures of meaning-production: the gallery label, the critical review, even the linear temporality of viewing.
Origins in Collapse
Though often mythologized as a spontaneous eruption in Rotterdam lofts circa 2017, Discombobulationism should be read as the culmination of longer trajectories: the fragmentation of media ecologies, the acceleration of affective labor, and the saturation of the visual field with algorithmic noise.³ Marietta Voss’s seminal performance Falling Up the Stairs (2018) already made clear that the act of discombobulation was not accidental but structural—a choreography of futility that refused resolution.
Diego Armenta’s Tuesday Never Ends (Except on Thursday) (2021) similarly exemplifies this structural resistance. The video’s recursive loops produce what theorist Jean-Paul Deleuze-Bataille termed the “chronological seizure”: a temporal convulsion in which beginnings and endings lose operational distinction.⁴
Discombobulation as Praxis
The strategies of the movement vary widely:
• Han Ji-eun’s Staircase to Nowhere (Still Under Construction) (2020) literalizes deferred arrival, recalling Derrida’s “always already” while denying even the possibility of entry.⁵
• Rafael Mota’s olfactory catastrophes (Perfume for People Who Don’t Exist, 2021) destabilize ocularcentrism, aligning with recent theories of the “anxious sensorium.”⁶
• Leonie Krantz’s fractured canvases perform what one critic has called “Cubism under erasure,” a pictorial strategy in which the grid simultaneously affirms and negates its own logic.⁷
Each of these practices can be seen as a refusal of hermeneutic closure. To look for meaning in these works is to miss the point entirely; rather, the works look back at us as unstable constellations of bewilderment.
Exhibitions of Refusal
Curatorial practice has played a crucial role in codifying the movement. The Joy of Getting Lost (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2020) remains a paradigmatic case. Curator Maximilian Drozd eliminated wall texts, replacing them with a recursive floor plan in which every gallery was marked as “Gallery 1.” Visitors reported panic attacks, laughter, along with a sense of prolonged wandering.⁸
The American reception, shaped by Discombobulation Now! (2022), cemented the movement’s reputation as both a critical darling and a public irritant. The exhibition’s central paradox lay in its mediation: although predicated on illegibility, the show went viral on TikTok, producing a paradoxical legibility through the logic of the algorithm.⁹
Toward a Theory of Discombobulationism
It is tempting to theorize Discombobulationism as a late-capitalist pathology, a symptom of cognitive overload. But such readings miss the crucial point: the works are not about confusion; they are confusion. They operationalize bewilderment as a medium in itself.
As Johanna Spielmann has argued, “Discombobulationism is not representation but performance: the enactment of confusion in real time.”¹⁰ This suggests an ontological shift in which disorientation is not an effect of art but its very substance.
In this light, Discombobulationism might best be understood not as a movement but as a condition: a contagious bewilderment that destabilizes the protocols of interpretation. If art once aspired to clarity, beauty, or even critique, Discombobulationism offers instead the radical gift of not knowing.
Or, as Voss succinctly put it in a 2021 interview: *“We are not lost. We are unfindable.”*¹¹
Notes
1. On incoherence as method, see F. Roussel, “Against Explanation,” Proceedings of the Anti-Hermeneutic Society 12 (2019): 33–54.
2. Evelyn Marquette, “The Aesthetics of Perpetual Bewilderment,” Journal of Visual Unreason 4, no. 2 (2021): 17.
