Back to normal in the Mall of America
Quote from CohentheWriter on 22. October 2022, 4:43Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xa84fc8bbc9e1f7ecc2b4e9e1f879d806d5384869&token=42&page=5
Source Link: https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xa84fc8bbc9e1f7ecc2b4e9e1f879d806d5384869/42
Date Minted: November 7, 2020
Artist Description: Things are getting back to normal in the Mall of America... Original creation by DKleine. 3290 X 2527 PNG (16 MB)
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
There is no “normal,” or, rather, “normal” never truly feels that way. At least, that’s the insinuation of DKleine’s pandemic-era piece of crypto art, Back to normal in the Mall of America. Even with a title stylized as if it were a proper sentence (no unnecessary capitalizations, as you can see), perhaps even a newspaper headline, we can see in the composition itself that the purported normal is still something alien to us all. But that characterizes so much high-pandemic experience, which I don’t necessarily need to explain in detail because we were all, of course, aware of it. Back to normal in the Mall of America isn’t just a commentary on our lost sense of normalcy, but also on humanity’s ability to create normalcy out of abjectly abnormal situations. We are quick-witted and adaptable species, perhaps (maybe even often so) to our collective detriment. DKleine has chosen not just a series of impeccable details to display this truth, but has situated these dtails in an environment as indicative of America’s weird pre-adapted brand of hyper-capitalism as anywhere on our soils. The Mall of America does indeed have a kind of mythic quality, especially to someone like me, growing up on the East Coast and hearing tell of Bloomington, Minnesota’s Mall-that’s-more-than-a-mall. To me, a mall was a place for the scene kids to hangout, mill about Tilly’s and Zumie’s, spoke cigarettes by the spiral fire escape in the back parking lot by the food court, and watch the normies emerge from Lord and Taylor with their shopping bags full of white socks and button-downs. But the Mall of America was more: It has a theme park and an aquarium, an opportunity to scuba dive, a mini-golf course, and a marriage chapel. It is also an entirely abnormal kind of structure. And yet, it is woven into the American landscape, an object of envy and imagination but not necessarily one of striking deviance or concern. There is no objective normalcy in the Mall of America, just as there was no objective normalcy during the pandemic. And yet, to the new rules of our new lives, there was a sensibility. DKlein explores them both, though we can’t quite avoid feeling that something is nevertheless wrong.
Bathed in chromatic static-like colors, this heavily pointillist composition centers a small scene within what could be any mall in America, but which the title purports to be the Mall of America. I do want to dwell on the physical composition for a moment, because it doesn’t appear to be initially computer-generated in the way that a lot of glitch-adjacent coloration appears to be. Whether computer-generated or not, the sheer magnitude of individually-colored dots creates the impression of a deeply-complex compositional style, and imbues the scene with a kind of frenetic energy that pulses within the lines of recognizable, hand-drawn objects. The most notable being the two individuals in the forefront of the piece, two predominantly-blue shoppers (though their coloration pulses with the same kind of frenzy as the rest of the piece, their internal colors restricted to turquoises and yellows) holding multicolored shopping bags seem to be waltzing their way through the center of the mall. The rub is that they’re wearing spacesuits, or things that bear overt resemblance to spacesuits. Four other blue individuals exist in the piece, two on the right-side of the composition and two more in the far background, but all of them also seem to be wearing the same clunky clothes, though judging by their facial expressions, they don’t seem to be very bothered. Just another day. Two great dark blue flags hang down from unseen rafters just above the mall’s second-level, which we can see swaths of, including the green ficuses abutting the railings there. What isn’t colored in with tiny flecks of rainbow colors are colored-in crudely by scribble-like lines, as if they’re a mistake in a notebook being crossed out. Names of stores are “written” with the same scribbles, lending an impersonality —and thus, a universality— to the setting itself.
Though quite beautiful, the colors and composition create an unsettling effect. We are drawn to awareness of individual particles, colors which evade our attention just as soon as we come to look upon them, lost again in the sea of their brethren. Whether this is an intentional reference to virus particles or just one I’m imposing upon the piece is beyond my knowledge. Still, there’s such an insinuation of minute, quantum-level activity that the composition style, combined with the overt pandemic references, seem to imply the unavoidable invasion of tiny pathogens.
And yet, nothing is more important to me than the extremely normal expressions on the faces that we can see. No panic. No discomfort. As the title says, everything has gone Back to normal in the Mall of America. The irony is that nothing has gone back to normal, but that a new normal has been entered into. This suggests that normalcy isn’t a state reverted to but one that is continually invented anew, something that continuously evades our grasp, lest we reach higher —and we always do— to grasp some of its tatters.
Source Link: https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xa84fc8bbc9e1f7ecc2b4e9e1f879d806d5384869/42
Date Minted: November 7, 2020
Artist Description: Things are getting back to normal in the Mall of America... Original creation by DKleine. 3290 X 2527 PNG (16 MB)
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
There is no “normal,” or, rather, “normal” never truly feels that way. At least, that’s the insinuation of DKleine’s pandemic-era piece of crypto art, Back to normal in the Mall of America. Even with a title stylized as if it were a proper sentence (no unnecessary capitalizations, as you can see), perhaps even a newspaper headline, we can see in the composition itself that the purported normal is still something alien to us all. But that characterizes so much high-pandemic experience, which I don’t necessarily need to explain in detail because we were all, of course, aware of it. Back to normal in the Mall of America isn’t just a commentary on our lost sense of normalcy, but also on humanity’s ability to create normalcy out of abjectly abnormal situations. We are quick-witted and adaptable species, perhaps (maybe even often so) to our collective detriment. DKleine has chosen not just a series of impeccable details to display this truth, but has situated these dtails in an environment as indicative of America’s weird pre-adapted brand of hyper-capitalism as anywhere on our soils. The Mall of America does indeed have a kind of mythic quality, especially to someone like me, growing up on the East Coast and hearing tell of Bloomington, Minnesota’s Mall-that’s-more-than-a-mall. To me, a mall was a place for the scene kids to hangout, mill about Tilly’s and Zumie’s, spoke cigarettes by the spiral fire escape in the back parking lot by the food court, and watch the normies emerge from Lord and Taylor with their shopping bags full of white socks and button-downs. But the Mall of America was more: It has a theme park and an aquarium, an opportunity to scuba dive, a mini-golf course, and a marriage chapel. It is also an entirely abnormal kind of structure. And yet, it is woven into the American landscape, an object of envy and imagination but not necessarily one of striking deviance or concern. There is no objective normalcy in the Mall of America, just as there was no objective normalcy during the pandemic. And yet, to the new rules of our new lives, there was a sensibility. DKlein explores them both, though we can’t quite avoid feeling that something is nevertheless wrong.
Bathed in chromatic static-like colors, this heavily pointillist composition centers a small scene within what could be any mall in America, but which the title purports to be the Mall of America. I do want to dwell on the physical composition for a moment, because it doesn’t appear to be initially computer-generated in the way that a lot of glitch-adjacent coloration appears to be. Whether computer-generated or not, the sheer magnitude of individually-colored dots creates the impression of a deeply-complex compositional style, and imbues the scene with a kind of frenetic energy that pulses within the lines of recognizable, hand-drawn objects. The most notable being the two individuals in the forefront of the piece, two predominantly-blue shoppers (though their coloration pulses with the same kind of frenzy as the rest of the piece, their internal colors restricted to turquoises and yellows) holding multicolored shopping bags seem to be waltzing their way through the center of the mall. The rub is that they’re wearing spacesuits, or things that bear overt resemblance to spacesuits. Four other blue individuals exist in the piece, two on the right-side of the composition and two more in the far background, but all of them also seem to be wearing the same clunky clothes, though judging by their facial expressions, they don’t seem to be very bothered. Just another day. Two great dark blue flags hang down from unseen rafters just above the mall’s second-level, which we can see swaths of, including the green ficuses abutting the railings there. What isn’t colored in with tiny flecks of rainbow colors are colored-in crudely by scribble-like lines, as if they’re a mistake in a notebook being crossed out. Names of stores are “written” with the same scribbles, lending an impersonality —and thus, a universality— to the setting itself.
Though quite beautiful, the colors and composition create an unsettling effect. We are drawn to awareness of individual particles, colors which evade our attention just as soon as we come to look upon them, lost again in the sea of their brethren. Whether this is an intentional reference to virus particles or just one I’m imposing upon the piece is beyond my knowledge. Still, there’s such an insinuation of minute, quantum-level activity that the composition style, combined with the overt pandemic references, seem to imply the unavoidable invasion of tiny pathogens.
And yet, nothing is more important to me than the extremely normal expressions on the faces that we can see. No panic. No discomfort. As the title says, everything has gone Back to normal in the Mall of America. The irony is that nothing has gone back to normal, but that a new normal has been entered into. This suggests that normalcy isn’t a state reverted to but one that is continually invented anew, something that continuously evades our grasp, lest we reach higher —and we always do— to grasp some of its tatters.