Why I Don’t Normally Name My Work
“Discarded”
Once in a while, I'll bother with a name for a piece to initiate a conversation about a concept, or at least, that's my intention, however lofty. But it's funny how a word can drastically change the interpretation of a piece and even serve to destroy it. This is why I typically stay away from naming pieces unless the name truly serves my purpose.
That being said, I love to toy with the idea that the most obvious interpretation of a named piece is "the correct one." In this case, someone may think the worst...maybe the woman was discarded by whoever is driving the car? Maybe she was a prostitute and just dumped along the road? Something along those lines. This is too obvious. But there's another problem with this, at least as it pertains directly to me.
This is when artists run the risk of coming off as disingenuous, especially if the origins of the work itself has absolutely nothing to do with the cause they're talking about. Just one man's opinion. But I see so much of this going on in the world of IG: Image X with Artist's Y commentary -- that we all know has not a lick of anything to do with the cause of women and women's rights. If I were to write something about women's rights, seemingly out of the blue, wouldn't many of you be calling my intentions into question? Maybe a little? For any number of reasons?
Before writing this caption, I imagined someone from a magazine interviewing me about "Discarded." She asked me, "Are feminist issues at the core of some of your other work as well?" I responded to my Make-Believe Interviewer: "What are you talking about? This is someone, someone who happens to be a woman, discarding her vehicle. She just left the keys in the ignition and said to herself, fuck it. I'm not driving this gas-guzzling, piece of shit any longer. The world is literally on fire because of this."
It's her Falling Down moment. Remember that movie? In that must-see movie, Michael Douglas's character snaps and leaves his car in traffic and simply walks away. He goes on to commit a crime spree before he's taken down. I've always loved that idea, that someone could just leave his car discarded on the road and just move on without it, consequences be damned. So, just for the record, before anyone reads anything noble into the title of this piece, the concept I'm playing with has nothing to do with me fronting for a cause, that while important, isn't one that I'm pretending to represent when the reality of it is that the original image came from my camera as I was walking around shooting street photography.
The other part of my psyche really doesn't care what anyone thinks it means, one way or the other. And maybe, just maybe, I made all of it up. Either way, being boring is far worse of a crime.
