By Matty Timmis
Believe me, I am not a fan of Instagram. It’s the closest fit I can think of to a ‘Babylon machine’, except maybe something like a credit score, but who the fuck really knows what that is. The strange thing is though, when examined honestly, Instagram’s Babylonian currents have been a powerful force for moulding who I am today, how we all exist in this strange new age, and where we all think we’re going. I’m not quite sure that’s the tragedy everyone would have you believe.
Now I am not a psychologist or a sociologist, in fact I can sometimes be a bit suspicious of those more abstract sciences, so this is not one of those tiresome researched or sourced papers. As an insufferable arts student, I much prefer to triangulate my sense of self and reality with the medium of other people’s creative expression. The other week then, as the clock on my phone taunted me with the grandiose digits of the evening, through midnight’s crescendo of zeros and onward to the meek little numbers of the pre-dawn morning, I stumbled upon something genuinely interesting. Amidst the chintzy buzz of the search feature, trapped in the gaudy mosaic, between tiles of hideous car crash videos, offensive memes and plastic surgery was a strange post that genuinely struck me.
What I had stumbled upon, in the suitably unpalatable hours of the morning, was a collection of ten paintings by Egon Schiele. These were like nothing I had ever seen before – piercingly raw, expressive, and tormented in their vivid simplicity. A protege of fellow Austrian Gustave Klimt – Schiele led a suitably troubled, bohemian existence. Dead by twenty-eight following a twisted, reckless life – pursuing an incestuous relationship with his sister and having a less than healthy relationship with alcohol, he bore well the stereotypes of a troubled artistic genius. This however is not an article about such a blackened bolt of lightning – this is an article about me, and hopefully about you too.
To start, what I think is so interesting about this unlikely discovery is the way in which it speaks to the power of art to occasionally triumph over the patter of the mundane. I certainly did not search for this, or any other kind of artistic revelation, and I’m certain my dastardly algorithm is not skewed to present me with anything so profound. Yet when I glimpsed it amongst the discards of empty degradation I was affected deeply, enraptured with the power of a few lines.
Those lines, those bewildered, tortured faces Schiele summoned, were strangely prescient to my online experience. I feel those wailing lines, sketched in a kind of visceral flow that would often see him fix his manic pencil to his paper for the duration of the piece, can be traced onto the minds of the digital age. There seems to smoulder in the singe of those brandished pen strokes, a very strange kind of symbiosis. Between those warped, shrewd sketches and the pale flame of our minds that flicker so fickle at every swipe, burning to the pace of the digital age.
There’s a desperate kind of compulsion lurking in our digital presence that, when considered, is fundamental to our conceptualisation of ourselves. That kind of stupefied, arresting gaze that we fix to our screens for interminable periods lingers in Schiele’s lucid, striking faces. I suspect Schiele’s inspirations stemmed seldom from contented individuals or joyous experiences, heaven knows he wasn’t a beacon of certitude. But he had the cogency to articulate a particular facet of those prosaic lives, to reveal the swirling mire of darkness that beckons us, that we have always escaped into.
I, for one, have never desired any relations with any of my family, nor do I have such a harrowing relationship with substances, but all of us I think remain ghastly consumptives. Instagram is often referred to as addictive, but I think the connotations of that word constitute a slight misunderstanding. We know that Instagram works almost exclusively to our detriment, yet we cannot resist complicity. We are not helpless to the ravages of addiction, we are engaged in creating our own snare. We not only consume but contribute. There is a darkness implicit in that, and that twisted human agency is written with crushing lucidity across these seemingly regular, strangely devastated faces. Like any true piece of art they are an accompaniment, a mirror in which looms a charmed derangement – the frantic consumption of our lives.
The elevation of beauty is scrawled over all of our Instagram feeds, and it sucks us into a strange semi-reality, ogling the embellished truth of lives. We too cannot help but project a vision of a life in its most favourable terms, but the depth lies in our desire to do this, which Instagram feeds off. What is so striking in these works then is their undressing – their candid presentation of our sparser, but more emotionally complex minds. Something that lies not in our mere projections onto Instagram, rather in a far more layered embodiment of our interaction with it. What I read in those warped lines of lives is far more complete than a post – it is the murmurs of all live’s choruses, crushing us and contenting us. In our age those strange figures, leering so tormented from the page, are more than glossy holiday posts or a ‘chronicling of memory’ , they also gape for our mindless hours of swiping. They know of the strange curse of existence, of our idle, ivory desires.
Schiele’s paintings, particularly those portraits that I first discovered, are exercises in that damnation, quantified in the digital age. They are portraits of the humdrum, of the menial and the uninspired, but they throb with a macabre revelation, one fuelled by the hopeless forces of consumption. They sing for the looming twilight churn we are so often ensnared in, scrolling to the conclusion of our wits, right out to the precipice of our contact with reality.
So whisper it, but maybe there’s something true in the Babylon machine. Maybe it has moments of brilliance, where the hard swing of the numbed chisel unearths a little vein of gold that courses through our minds, when the miasma is illumined by an eerie brilliance. I am aware Zuckerberg has actually managed to get worse recently, as though he were in some fiendish race to the base of man’s ineptitude. Would the world be a better place if he had kept his churlish woman rating creation in his virginal notepad? Probably. Does there remain however glimmers of creativity’s timeless capacity to reflect personhood and inflect reality even there? I think there may well be.
As a footnote, Instagram can’t be too terrible, chances are that it is the means by which you found this pretentious crap!