gloamingdaydream

1. Tell me how you first got into the art community. Was it art that led you to it, or was it the community itself that led you to art?

I remember the first time I got really into art was around the 2017 Oscar season when I watched the trio of La La Land, Moonlight, and Manchester by the Sea and became obsessed with movies. I wanted to talk about them constantly and naturally sought out spaces to do so, until eventually I was invited to a film group chat during high school by someone I actually ended up on really bad terms with. The discourse there wasn’t great by any means, but it was really my first exposure to being a part of a community of people that all share the same interests and are dedicated to talking about them. I found a lot of great films from that chat, and eventually started shifting more towards music and literature. I think there is a sort of feedback loop involved, because whatever thing I’m currently the most interested in influences the types of communities I get exposed to, but I’m also more drawn to the people that seem to challenge my viewpoint most effectively and that shapes what sort of things I spend my time engaging with. I’ve been in several different iterations of the art community over the last 5 years, and to me it feels like each one is more rewarding than the last, which I think is just the result of my perspective evolving along with the people who help shape it.

2. What would you say is your artistic philosophy and what role has the artstagram community had in helping shape it over the years?

I wouldn’t say that I necessarily have an artistic philosophy, I think every work of art has its own philosophy and I like to try my best to meet it where it’s at and uncover as much value as I can that exists within that space. If I were to pinpoint any single concept of artistic expression that I think most consistently produces resonant works it would be sincerity. I’m an incredibly sincere person, I think that’s really the only value in someone like me doing an interview like this, I put as much of myself as I can into what I have to say, and that results in the inherent gaps of understanding between people being a lot easier to fill or identify. When you put unflinching sincerity in the hands of an actual genius like Mark Kozelek, Jeff Mangum, Father John Misty, Elena Ferrante, or Nathan Fielder you get works that encompass not just entire philosophies but entire people, and you are able to follow their conscious and subconscious process at every step of the way. When I think about the works of art I hold in the very highest esteem (The Neapolitan Novels, In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, Pure Comedy, Ulysses, The Rehearsal, Kozelek albums etc.) the most common thread that reveals itself is the fact that the artist has made themselves not only extremely visible within the work, but allowed every bit of truth uncovered within it to actively reshape who they are as a person, and as a result the person on the other end who is engaging with it as well. When I think about my own art I haven’t really branched that far out beyond the self, I haven’t come close to some universalized literary style or insanely complex structural conception. What I know to be my own strengths at this current moment are the fact that I understand myself and my own experiences extremely well, and I am willing to reveal them as openly and introspectively as possible. I’ve found that a single memory or experience can branch out into infinitely complex and significant webs of possibility and understanding, and I try to incorporate everything I’ve ever learned into everything I do, and then everything I do into everything I learn. As far as how the art community has shaped this perspective, there are a lot of people I have met who I’ve had so much to learn from intellectually and that obviously contributes to everything I would like to think I know now, but it’s also another one of those experiences that helps me better understand myself and what I care about. It’s a place where I don’t feel like I have to mask any of my passion and intensity, where I can be completely authentic and know this will be respected rather than judged the majority of the time, and this has been very helpful in regards to coming to terms with the person I am and how nakedly this is reflected in the things I say and do.

3. You’ve recently changed your username to dissolving.boundaries. I obviously know what it represents, but how would you explain it to someone unfamiliar with the artistic origin of that expression? And what would you say inspired the change?

I made this account when I was 14 and named it crazyclemsonfan, the username I used for everything at the time. I was extremely into Clemson football at the time, and I think it was really just a way to stay connected to my childhood and the place I grew up in. It became a central aspect of my identity, people recognized it as an expression of that passion despite its corniness. When I was watching week 2 of college football this year and we were losing 16-0 to Troy I had the realization that it was time to move on. Not only had Clemson football failed to meet the standard that I took so much pride in as a fan, they simply no longer represented the part of my identity that felt so important to express on this page. I ended up choosing dissolving.boundaries, which is a reference to The Neapolitan Novels. In the book Lila talks about this as a phenomenon where the metaphysical borders that give form to everything we can see and understand begin to collapse and everything around her starts to blend into an indistinguishable web of feeling and thought. The concept also applies pretty heavily to the core dynamic of the novel, Elena and Lila are two characters who share so much of each other that their thoughts, feelings, desires, and fears spill over into each other and it becomes difficult to separate the self from those who have defined it so inextricably. I initially got the idea from a line towards the end of the book that might be my favorite in all of art, “to give her a form whose boundaries would not dissolve”. This concept has a large presence in lots of other great art as well (The Man Without Qualities, Evangelion, In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, Ulysses, etc.), and it felt like a good representation of some of the ideas I try to represent in the things I post. The boundaries dissolving between the art and the artist, the critic and the audience, the self and the non self, every formal border of separation collapsing into pure truth and catharsis. That’s the most honest condition of the best art, and the essence of what I’m trying to reach when I write about it, even if those boundaries have to be redrawn for the sake of proper communication.

4. What made you agree to do this interview with me?

Nobody has ever asked to interview me before , the idea that someone would want to ask me individualized questions about my own perspective and genuinely care about what I had to say makes me happy.

5. How would you define an artist? Would you consider yourself one?

This is a difficult question to answer because I’m very tempted to contradict myself. When I look at myself I don’t see the condition of the artist, I see someone who is just in the process of trying to understand what makes art so important, and try and apply that to my own life and experience. But I think an artist is anyone who is committed to creating beauty or truth out of life. This definition is far broader than any that typically get enforced in more specific discourse surrounding whether or not some individual thing constitutes art, but I think we are doing ourselves and the world a major disservice if we try to categorize art as something which meets a specific criteria and then work our way outwards rather than acknowledging a more universal artistic condition and working our way inwards when a higher level of scrutiny is demanded of us. As for the things I write, my reviews are not art, or at least they aren’t my art. It’s an extension of the art I’m talking about, and any of the value found in the reviews comes from the work itself, not my writing. My job is just to take the value I have found and communicate it to others so they know how and where to look for it. The closest thing to art that I make is an assortment of what essentially reads like Proust excerpts, and I do believe these have potential to come together to create something larger and more meaningful in the future. So to answer the question of if I would consider myself an artist, I would say not yet, but I am actively seeking to become one through the process I believe will yield the strongest results.

6. Same question but for art critics.

A critic is anyone who approaches art with the intention of discovering what makes it valuable, applying that process to find works that have value, and attempting to communicate where that value lies and how to find it to others. In this sense I would most definitely consider myself a critic. It’s true I am an Instagram page with 600 followers with no professional credentials or financial incentive, but I think the fact that I do it for the love of the game only strengthens my case.

7. You’ve been reading The Man Without Qualities for a good while now. Tell me about your experience with it so far and how it has influenced your views on art and the world (if it has at all)

It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever read on a chapter by chapter basis. It’s not an easy read by any means, my brain is working overtime for every chapter. But it’s incredibly rewarding, I feel like I’m twice as smart as I was before every time I pick it up. It’s just so incomprehensibly complex, every chapter will contain entire histories and philosophies and yet they will come together to serve as a single incident for the events of the book, which somehow represent something even larger. Musil sees our world as one of infinite possibilities, and he pulls them down from the sky and into the book. He writes characters in a way that gives them almost an omnipotent presence and breadth of knowledge, but without detaching them from their circumstances. About a month ago I had what could reasonably be described as a psychotic break after finishing one of the chapters in the posthumous papers. I think I’ve said before that the theoretically most insane person in the world would be the one who is aware of the highest level of truth, Musil has probably said this in the book as well. My brain was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of truth the chapter contained. Not truth as a single revelation, but a web of interlocking insights, each one undoing and then reconstructing the previous one. The problem is that when reading the book it hits you in the form of revelation, and that can take a lot of time and intense thought to parse through, which results in me walking down the streets of Austin saying “Holy shit” over and over again as my head spins relentlessly. I’ve shared this bit before but I’ll share it one more time, here is something I jotted down trying to process my reaction at that time:

“Staring back into the void which thrust us onto this planet and finding comfort in the nothingness we recognize as the counterbalance to our material reality until one ascends to a plane of higher understanding, a mode of being where the boundaries between man and god dissolve into the air that lingers over the conversation in which the words do not even need to be spoken in order to be understood. At least understood in some capacity that exists in perfect harmony with human nature, which permeates the fabric of every fundamental question regarding the lives of our characters while simultaneously in its truest form is found to not exist at all.”

This probably means nothing to those of you who haven’t read the book, so I guess you just have to go read it to figure out what I’m talking about.

As for how it’s changed my views on art and the world it’s difficult to quantify. When I interact with people I see more of them, I understand their motivations better. I have gained a far greater appreciation for art and people in the context of historical movements. I know more things and I know better how little I still know. I don’t really think I have the capabilities to pinpoint it further than that, every work of art I do works itself effortlessly into the tapestry of who I am as a person and how I view the world. I can reflect this tapestry back into my own art, but I’m not sure I can pick apart which parts come from which works. Though I will say The Man Without Qualities is certainly among the most significant of them.

8. The entire time I’ve known you, you’ve been incredibly outspoken politically, more than anyone else on artstagram. How do you engage with these important topics so much without letting it exhaust you mentally?

I think it’s easy for a lot of people to look at the political state of the world and think “it’s better for my own mental health to choose to not care about this”, but the reality is that it’s an incredibly privileged position to even have the option to not care about politics. If you’re trans or an immigrant in America right now, or a citizen of Gaza, Congo, Sudan, or any other of the countless populations of people being ruthlessly exploited and brutally oppressed you don’t really have a choice whether you care about politics or not, that’s not a dichotomy that would even register for you. Your entire life is a political struggle to survive and be recognized as a human being. And then you have people like me who are born into academic middle class privilege with the ability to become informed on these issues and speak out without negative material consequences, and I think it would be a complete and utter waste if I didn’t. I was walking on campus the other day and happened to run into a student March against Trump’s federal compact and decided to join. It’s not like I’m some political revolutionary, I’m not out there firebombing ICE facilities, but in a time where I feel like I’m surrounded by apathy It was nice being a part of something with other people who care.

It’s still tempting sometimes to read the news and try to shut everything out, take advantage of the privilege I have by just living in a protective bubble. But one primary goal of fascism is always to generate a broad sense of artistic, interpersonal, and political apathy, and more often than not I realize that our current state of affairs only reinforces how much these things matter and how important it is to stay tethered to them. It’s scary to see official state department rhetoric declaring me an enemy of the state, but I think anyone who isn’t an enemy of the current state really isn’t doing enough with their voice to fight for positive change. I think it’s also easy for me in a sense because art and academia are starting to be under attack, and my sense of privilege from these issues will not last very long. I don’t really talk explicitly about politics on this page anymore, my focus has been entirely on art. I think in order to reach the level of political consciousness necessary for drastic change in the world there needs to be a certain degree of foundational understanding of empathy, truth, and spirituality imbued into the general public, and art is a more direct and effective means of doing so than political theory. If my goal is to light an intense spark of disillusionment with the neo liberal world order and a personal embodiment with revolutionary struggle in the average person I would far rather they read The Neapolitan Novels than Das Kapital. That being said, if you read between the lines a bit in everything I post on this page there is still a very strong presence of radical political beliefs, they are just engrained into a means of communication which often feels less impersonal and more immediately resonant. While my life is no longer dedicated to the glorious and eternal science of dialectical materialism, class consciousness continues to permeate my worldview on everything around me. You can’t care about art without caring about politics, it’s a fundamental contradiction. The vast majority of people on this planet do not currently have the proper material conditions to engage with art the way I would like people to, and as long as I care about the transformative nature of art I care about creating a society where it can exist in a way that is accessible to everyone and free from censorship. Art has been at the forefront for every revolution of social consciousness in human history, and any account of artistic history which doesn’t include this view is incomplete. It’s possible to care about politics without caring about art, but you will be missing a good chunk of why politics matters so much and your message will be less effective to others.

9. How important do you think the creation of Finnegans Woke was?

It’s too early to tell. I don’t feel as if its creation was an intentional action, it felt like an inevitable result of the proximity of a group of strong willed and passionate people when it comes to art. It’s pretty crazy that the chat might never have existed if it wasn’t for the single biggest loser in this community trying to bring people together, sometimes coincidence and circumstance create opportunities that are too phenomenal to not take them and run as far as you can with them. I think it’s been incredibly influential in my journey, there are a lot of things I’ve found through discussions in there that are among my all time favorites now. There has been a ton of valuable discourse in that chat, and I would say I’ve made some genuine connections there as well. Unfortunately since the start of basketball season there has been more talk of Josh Giddey than James Joyce, it might take a major canon event such as the return of Rapthoughtworld or a Bird TV arc to thrust it into a new renaissance.

10. What is your fondest moment with art?

I remember it was March 2024 and I was almost done with The Neapolitan Novels. I had been at a real low point mental health wise until Neapolitan really helped pull me out of it so I was still doing Ketamine assisted psychotherapy. I had the idea to time up my next session to be right after I finished the books, as I had an inkling that would be an absolutely transcendent experience. The morning of my mom drove me up while I read the end of the novels in the backseat. I remember finishing and immediately breaking into a cavalcade of tears, the emotions were so intense that it seemed as if nothing else existed outside of the world of Elena, Lila, and the dolls. For the past month I had let myself become completely enveloped by the life of these two people, I was invested in their stories far beyond anything I had previously thought possible with literature. And here I was at the conclusion of their stories, where their entire lives full of such incredible heartbreak, love, connection, loss, and despair were given a final form that recontextualized every single moment into something which stood eternally upright against the forces of time and distance.

I want to say that I identified with them in that moment more than I ever have any people, but I truly feel as if my self ceases to exist for the time being and I existed only as a vessel to carry their stories. I quickly went into my ketamine session, and while I do not remember much, I do remember that I re-experienced their entire lives as told in the novels with the new perspective I had gained after finishing. Every conscious and subconscious emotion, thought, or instinct the novels had spurred in me was brought to the surface over the course of that hour, it was the ultimate cathartic output of what felt like the most important thing in the entire world. As soon as I was unhooked I stumbled into the bathroom and broke down into years again. I was overwhelmed by the idea that two people could ever be that close, the idea that I could reach them through the text, that the boundaries between my world and theirs could dissolve and then be rebuilt in the image of truth and love. I called two of my friends and told them it was the best work of art ever made, that my entire life felt different now, that I had unlocked a new mode of consciousness which revealed far more possibilities to the human experience that I hadn’t been aware of before. When I talked to them later about that phone call they described it as if I was possessed by some supernatural force, and they maintained that despite my usual intensity they had never again witnessed me return to that form. That moment was by far the most intense emotions I have ever felt in my life, I felt as if I had ascended beyond being human into something more closely aligned with pure spirituality. Sometimes I wish I could return to that moment, or that I could experience something like it again, but as I write this the space it occupies in my memory feels fitting as is. Sometimes I wish I could describe it adequately, that I could communicate this unique sublime experience to others in a way that they would understand, that’s part of the job of a writer after all. But I am not capable of doing so, that moment exists beyond my understanding of both language and my own condition. Perhaps Elena Ferrante can, but I cannot, and this inadequacy is ok with me, for I would never have experienced the moment in the way that I did without it.

11. What motivated you to start your art review project? How was it helped you in evolving your account?

When I first started to organize my ratings I would often think, “why should anybody care about this number? How do they know what it means?”. And this was validated by the fact that I would often be asked to explain why something was as good as I thought it was, and I found that I greatly enjoyed sharing my insight into what I thought made something good. I really liked the idea of having a piece of writing up for every single work of art I considered great that showcased my perspective on what makes it as good as it is. Not every review I post is super high quality, but the concept of someone eventually being able to go through my highlights and easily access my thoughts and perspective on every single work of art in any medium at 7/10 or higher makes me feel a lot better about my credibility as a critic and my role in the community as someone who wants to stay as actively engaged in meaningful discussions surrounding these things as possible. It will be about a year since I started this project in December, and there still isn’t really an end in sight, it’s taking much longer than I thought it would. That being said I’m thoroughly enjoying it and I’m finding fulfillment in every review I post. I’m early enough in my journey with art that this is a realistic feat for me, and it’s not something I really see anybody else doing so it’s pretty exciting.

As far as how it’s shaped my account it’s really been the only thing I’m posting along with the daily art diary. I like the balance of sharing day to day thoughts on things I’m doing along with some higher effort writing pieces on the more significant works. I’m building my own personal canon of great art, and I think deep down I want people to pay attention to it and see some value in it, but I can’t really expect anyone to do that if I’m not providing genuine insight on every work. As passionate as I am about this project I’m not letting it consume too much of my time, it’s sort of taken a backseat to school, the new art I’m doing, and a social life. I realized there isn’t a deadline to get it done, I have all the time in the world and as long as I’m enjoying the process I might as well take advantage of it.

12. Is there anything I haven’t brought up that you’d like to talk about? It could be about anything.

For any of you who are still reading at this point I think I’ve taken up enough of your time already, so I just want to say I really appreciate listening to what I have to say and you probably have better things to be doing with your time right now, like reading The Neapolitan Novels or The Man Without Qualities.