The following interview from 2020 was included in Locust #3. Adam Ray Adkins, a.k.a., Dirt: Son of Earth, is a mixed media artist and poet.
Adam Turl: The first question I wanted to ask you was about your moniker, “Dirt: Son of Earth.” I thought of two things. One, there is a gesture of aesthetic leveling -- sort of a punk gesture -- in calling yourself Dirt. But I assume it is also a reference to the biblical meaning of your name.
Adam Ray Adkins: Both of these are my intention. There is the biblical meaning but definitely there’s identifying with something lower but incredibly useful to us. People want to get rid of dirt in their homes but the soil is very important for life on the planet. And then, for me, it also sounds Star Trek-like — kind of like Wharf, son of Mogh. I came up with that when I was doing graffiti and street art more but I liked it and stuck with it. I think having something of a moniker allows me to not just stay inside my everyday self. When I’m creating, I have that little bit of an escape that allows me to be something else, that allows that creativity to reach beyond the everyday life that I experience.
AT: It reminds me of how one of our editors, Anupam Roy, talks about the “impossibility of representation,” as well as the popular idea that you can only really talk about yourself. But by giving an irrealism and alterity to yourself you aren’t so limited.
ARA: Absolutely. That’s going along the same lines.
AT: You make both analog, or IRL, paintings and collages — albeit in a way that reminds me of vaporwave or digital glitch art — as well as making online interventions, videos, and variations of glitch art and so on. One of the things we’ve talked about at *Locust Review* is the promise of both the digital and analog and the insufficiency of both. We’ve talked about responding with a kind of Brechtian Cybernetics, alternating and interpenetrating between the two. I was wondering if you could talk about these two aspects of your own practice. You have a short video, *I Was a Self Before I Was a Selfie*, that seems to get at some of these contradictions. Then you have your cell phone abstraction video that seems to literally be an example of the kind of cybernetics that we’re talking about as you seem to glitch, in real time, the abstract painting that you’re working on.
ARA: For me, I think they are both important. It’s a relatively newer concept to me. I didn’t like digital art at all for a while, and I still think of myself, primarily, as an analog artist. I like the physicality of art. But it’s necessary to engage in the digital. I often, in my digital works, include pieces, either scans or videos, of physical art. I bring it in there and mix it with found images from the internet, with popular memes. I really enjoy exploring the free tools that all these social medias like Instagram and Tik Tok -- all the free tools and the stuff you can do with them that I don’t think is even intentional. So, with Instagram, the Story Mode allows you to put gifs into things. You can take those gifs and arrange them almost into new media collages, and subvert some of these popular images that are out there for anyone to use. Of course, you’re limited by the platform itself and you have to be aware of that, but it does give you a lot of play that was not available before. So, when I started posting art more online, I quickly became aware that I had to start messing around with digital art itself, and try to recreate some of those things that you find in physical art. The dragging of the paint brush across the canvas when you’re painting an abstract background -- that feeling can be (kind of) replicated with the glitching of an image or video, or slowing music to the point that it sounds like it’s falling apart. Audio corruption, to me, is very similar to the way a light layer of paint looks across a canvas, where you can still see the elements of the underpainting. You’re aware that you’re in this digital space and the digital space is also corruptible. The digital has a materialness that can be easily lost with the perfection digital space seems to impose upon us. Whether it be the perfect web design or the highly sculpted and Photoshopped Instagram model.
Adam Ray Adkins, Gardening on Venus, 2020 (@art.o.dirt)
Adam Ray Adkins, Catch Up Loser, I Made a Playlist for the Sacrifice, 2020
AT: What made you initially hostile or suspicious of digital art? And how did that change?
ARA: Well, hostile, I think, because I value the physicality of art making. When I’m painting or making a collage or something like that I rely on a lot of automatic techniques. I play these little games and I try to build rhythms with myself and my body becomes a pretty important part in it, the way I’ve learned to flick my wrists or the lines that I favor. I do a lot of improv art with musicians where I paint on stage with Infinite Third (a local musician here named Billy Mays III). He’ll make impromptu music and I’ll do an impromptu painting. We’ll go to a place, set up, and do a three hour set. That ability to create something in that space is really reliant on so much. It is reliant on my physical body, the crowd interaction, the music that Billy would be playing (or any artist, I’ve done it with a lot of people). I value that so much because it allows that play. I think for a long time I didn’t do digital art because it saw it as getting away from play. I saw it as design aesthetics rather than what might have been called High Art before. Seeing the rise of glitch art and even vaporwave, in some of its darker forms, showed me it was possible to have more fun with art by playing with pre-generated algorithms. For example, what filters can do to something, especially if you go over the same image ten to fifteen times to see what it creates. It’s analogous to some of the imperfections and randomness that generate with physical art. It’s different but I started to see the positivity in it, or, at least, the ability to have surprises.
AT: One of the things that we’ve talked about at *Locust Review* is that something can be simultaneously Gothic and Futurist. That the past is both horror and nostalgia and the future is both promise and threat and the present is precarious, teetering between all four of these things. How do you see the digital or the traditional painting as it relates to time? I think this is related to the tension between design and expression. One of the things that happens to people when they go to art school, if they go to one of the more conceptual art schools, is they are told that they should stop being a painter. But you’re sort of doing both.
ARA: That’s interesting. I don’t think I think of it very often along those lines. I will say I enjoy the ability to get lost in a painting and in the actual painting process. When I first started drawing a lot I partly did it as a social anxiety coping mechanism. I just started drawing like crazy when I was around people. I was constantly doodling so that, in a sense, it filled up portions of my time. But then painting is seen as an antiquated art. People favor conceptual art more. Digital stuff almost operates in this space outside of time. It feels timeless. It doesn’t age. You might get higher definition in the future but the file itself doesn’t age the way a drawing or painting would. It’s able to cross aesthetic boundaries where you’re not sure where something comes from. It’s very easy for it to look like a past object or a projection of the future object. Or the present, as I think you were getting at. But, then digital stuff is so often consumed while we are wasting time. While you’re on your phone, you’re scrolling through stuff. Or maybe you’re at work, or on a break or it’s our free time and we’re trying to forget about that stuff. Digital is just this endless loop of artwork available out there for people to consume. Or images that have been transposed into the digital. I’d have to think more about it but that’s my answer.
AT: I had a thought while you were talking. What if the glitch in digital art is sort of like a forced aging, a forced reassertion of time against the timeless? And, by extension, if you think about *The German Ideology*, the bourgeois nature of corporate digital space, or, for example, people resurrecting the aesthetics of things like GeoCities.
ARA: Right, yeah. I think that’s a positive thing for glitch. But, the resurrecting of the early 90’s aesthetics is something else. Trying to make it look like that, it just lasts forever. Like those times can be revisited and relived, but they never really are fully those things. They’re an idealized version of them. I remember those sites and when I visit something that’s kind of mimicking that it has that nostalgia at first — but it never quite gets to it. It never has that hope and freedom that was experienced when we first encountered those things. When you don’t get that feeling, it feels bad in a way. Almost lost.
Adam Ray Adkins, Simpler Times, 2020 (@art.o.dirt)
Adam Ray Adkins, A Brain Between Them, 2020 (@art.o.dirt)
AT: In terms of your painting, what do you see as the relation between the largely abstract painting you do and the collage elements? For example, in your piece, *Terraforming the Desert of the Real*, there is, as you mentioned before, an automatic (as in Surrealist) aspect to the abstraction in relationship to the collage. It reminds me a lot more of Dada or Surrealism than, for example, New York School Abstract Expressionism.
ARA: Right. That’s one that I created over a three hour period during a live show. It starts off, almost always, with painting. But sometimes I have collage elements in mind. But, what I typically do is bring a big folder of stuff with me if I’m doing a live event like that. If I’m working in my studio, it’s different. I have all my materials with me. But after I create something through the more automatic process I go through these other things that I’ve collected, these collage materials. They’re images other people have produced, often advertisements or other things that just stuck with me when I flipped past them in magazines or photo books. And I figure out how to piece those into the composition that is already there. I think the composition of the painting and abstraction builds a very broad form that you can play with by adding those collaged images and seeing how they interact. Often my images will sit on top of the painting strongly. Sometimes the paint will go back over them. I see that as these little moments of clarity that come out through the landscape. I think my paintings especially, as opposed to the digital work, operate in ways that force the viewer to create narratives to them. They have just enough elements of a narrative to make it seem like there’s something there. They remain abstract enough that the viewer forces their mind to work through some of these questions. It almost operates in a psycho-analytic way. The viewer is projecting stuff onto the piece and it’s forcing their mind to ask certain questions. The collage materials really help with that because these are images to which we are all privy. It’s not that I painted the perfect owl. It’s that anyone could come across this owl at any moment. Or this bird or these words. I like to throw in my own doodles, as well, as they relate to the images. I cut stuff out of my sketch book and add that into the mass produced cultural images as well. Because it can’t all just be magazine clippings. There’s nothing new to that.
AT: Having the different sort of collage elements, the sketches from your sketchbook, this is something I’ve also done lately — taking my own work and images from other people and mixing it together. I’m curious to what extent you see that as improvisational and to what extent you want to hit certain cultural or “meaning” notes for the viewer.
ARA: There is a mix and I would say it does tend towards hitting certain things for the viewer. But those things have already been filtered through me: what I choose to pick out. I don’t want to spell out the story for people, most of the time. That’s something I’ve really tried to get away from. I used to do more simplistic narratives in my work where it was very easy to come up with the meaning. As if I was just showing you what I want you to believe. So, you have to switch between the elements that allow for meaning to exist but also acknowledge the messiness of lived experience — of what art means to each person. I often have pretty strong interpretations of my own work but I try not to let that overly determine what other people are going to take away from it. I pick out out cultural references with symbolic or emotional points to me. But I also want to allow that interplay — knowing that I’m not setting it in stone for someone else.
AT: I know you’re influenced by the history of Surrealism amongst other things. How important do you consider the act of improvisation itself for you? For your own artistic practice and politics?
ARA: In my own artistic practice it’s pretty important. I think also that it’s important to develop the skill to have improvisation. It’s not so easy to just sit down and improv something out. Anyone can do it. But developing the ability, the confidence, the attention to play with forms, allowing your mind to see things and then draw them out further. And, then go back into more automatic creation. It is a delicate process. As far as politics goes, I’m not sure how much improvisation is important there. I think it probably is although I haven’t put as much work into the theorizing of that. I try to incorporate ideas. I try to read and stay up to date on politics. I have my ideas. I try to read philosophy and incorporate those into the works of art. But it’s often me trying to understand these things rather than simply reproduce them or say “this is the correct answer” or “this is the wrong thing.” I think, in a way, the art is me working out how I’m understanding the world itself. In politics, I think we probably could use some more improvisation. There, again, it’s a very delicate line. I wouldn’t advocate for total spontaneity. There is work that has to be done that requires something very different than improvisation. Organizing people and movements and community. At the same time, if we don’t take that improvisation into account we end up with something very awful. A move towards some kind of totalitarian movement, like a Stalinist interpretation.
AT: I was thinking more about the political meaning of improvisation rather than improvisation as politics — but I wasn’t very clear. Improvisation as a political act, I think helps create that contradictory space for the viewer, It helps create freedom in the mind of both the viewer and the artist. Like the Surrealists would say about automatic writing or drawing. I think one of the contradictions of that, of course, is that our subconsciouses are no more free than our conscious minds, at least at this point, because capitalist realism has done its work on us. I think that’s one of the things you’re trying to get at with the tension in your work; curated materials and the improvisational approach to using them.
ARA: I do think that there is an important political aspect to it in that sense. Maybe even deeper than my political beliefs, I believe, on a certain level, that creativity and improvisation is necessary for the human. We absolutely need that. It expands on the unconscious and conscious minds that are absolutely unfree. You implied that that has changed. The unconscious is not as free as it used to be. I don’t think it ever actually was. That’s a difficult thing to think about. But allowing those moments of creativity, cultivating them and playing with them, and allowing them to be refolded back into your conscious mind, allows for some kind of freedom. I’ve been reading a lot of Adorno lately and his arguments for abstraction go hand in hand with that. Pure rationalizing is really stopping this ability for hope of the novel. The newness that could come. This changing. We’re producing the cycle over and over again. Insisting on some kind of improvisation insists on the power of the creative human subject and helps break you out of that cycle. Even if it doesn’t break you out of the cycle it allows for the ability to see that the cycle could be broken. It’s much harder to actually break out of cycles. But breaking out of the cycle of knowing that cycles are inevitable is easier and that’s probably closer to what I think visual art or any art can really do. I guess kind of like that Tupac quote “I don’t think I’m going to change the world but I think I’m going to touch the mind that will change the world.” Or something like that. That’s easier to do.
Adam Ray Adkins, Terraforming the Desert of the Real, mixed-media on paper, 2020
Adam Ray Adkins, Inside Every Horse is Two Women, 2020 (@art.o.dirt)
AT: The Tupac quote is good because it gets at the possibilities but also the limits of political artwork. I’m a Marxist. I believe that the exploited and oppressed should emancipate themselves. If you think the artist can emancipate them you don’t think that. But it’s not as if art is not important... You also have the Acid Communism Facebook page. I think you’re involved with developing an Acid Communism anthology and the *Acid Left* podcast with Michael Watson. Can you describe what you mean by Acid Communism, which was, if I recall correctly, an idea put forward by Mark Fisher as an antithesis to capitalist realism – “the specter of a world which could be free.”
ARA: The Acid Communism Facebook page was started by someone inspired by Fisher. They asked a handful of people to help with the postings and I am one of them. They’re doing very well. Then Mike Watson, myself, and Terry Tapp recently started the Acid Left page and podcast and videos, trying to carry on in the same vein but focusing a little bit more on artistic production and its intersection with politics. But what I mean by Acid Communism… I was very inspired when I read Fisher’s text, Capitalist Realism, back when it first came out, and then again when the K-Punk book was released and had the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism. It is about creating a merging of left counter-culture with the more political Communist left. It is kind of trying to bring – I don’t want to say idealism because that’s wrong – but it’s kind of a challenge to pure materialism. Not that materialism is wrong but it’s about understanding the psychic element in it, the conscious element in it, and knowing that that is very important. Kind of working also on the Frankfurt school’s notions that merge Freud and Marx together. And understanding that there is a feedback loop there. So, really trying to play with the boundaries of the mind similar to the way that psychedelics in the 1960’s played with the mind and the boundaries of the self. But, I think the internet tends to flatten some of these things. We tend to speak in these ways, especially when we’re making memes or something, that highlight an easy to grasp or too on-the-nose metaphor, where we talk about LSD or magic mushrooms. But that’s not all it is. One of the most important parts of the counter-culture movements were the psychedelic spaces. Fisher talks about them as spaces where the very social order itself was challenged. You would go into spots and you would just experience a completely different kind of life than what existed before. That included commune spaces. Bringing that back and bringing the political back into the psychedelic, back into counter-cultural movements, and bringing class back into discussion with these things. I think we’ve seen the psychedelic movement and the things around it drift into kind of a reactionary state. Which I think is awful and quite dangerous. So, trying to bring those questions of class back and merge them with psychedelic mind expansion, with feminist mind expansion, where the individual grows to change what it they’re holding on to — the confines they have created for themselves. Whether that be gender roles, race relations, and then of course class relations, challenging those the same way that LSD challenges the neurochemistry of the mind… To show that there is a material aspect to it. If we’re talking about the mind again, there are chemical impulses creating reality itself and they can be changed. The mind has an incredible plasticity to it. It expands and changes all the time. So, our intervention there is to try to create moments of confusion, moments of lucidity, and warp already existing notions into a way that forces anyone engaging with them to re-examine their own position. And then also, to make it more fun, too. I have a strong belief that the left needs to be fun. As vapid as that sounds. It has to be engaging. The cultural stuff that we’re creating, whether its pictures, music, video essays, any of that, it can’t be dry, academic, stuff. It has to be something that the working class would want to ingest. And ideally, created by the working class. And allowing that to feed back into itself. Taking some of this away from “ivory towers” where it’s a very stodgy, dry, academic history. Not that those things aren’t important. But they’re not going to get people that interested. The Acid Communism anthology is being put together by Terry Tapp through his new press Mysterio Books. The anthology will contain essays, poems, short stories, and some visual artwork that is a response to Fisher’s unfinished Acid Communism introduction. I am on the editor team for this project, and we are still currently accepting submissions.
AT: Do you know the Marxist philosopher Holly Lewis? She’s one of our editors.
ARA: Not that I can recall. Although, if it’s been in the first two Locust Reviews I would have read it. Obviously, they blend together for me -- which is actually, I think, great. They become a mesh of disorienting and reorienting pieces through the whole of the issue.
AT: They’re meant to do that, rather than a traditional journal where everything is completely separate, reflecting the separation of elements in the manner of bourgeois ideology... Anyway, one of the things Holly Lewis has argued is that the cruder Marxisms let a Cartesian dualism through the backdoor of historical materialism: a denial of the mind rather than seeing the mind itself as part of the material. This is related, I think, to what you are talking about. When someone says they saw a ghost, their mind, which is a material thing, has decided for material reasons to either lie about that ghost, or they actually saw something they thought was a ghost. That doesn’t mean there was a ghost but there is a material basis for what they saw. To me, this is related to putting the working class subject at the center of politics, as you were talking about. How do we experience the material world with our material brains? One of the Surrealist quotes I love is that it is “impossible to experience reality directly.” Reality is insufferable and impossible. Some people come up with conspiracy theories to understand that reality, to reconcile the importance of their life and their existence with a situation that’s not acceptable. I don’t think there is anything non-materialist seeing the psychological and the mental and the dream world as central to people’s lives.
ARA: I agree completely. It is difficult sometimes to talk about, because I don’t want to use the word “idealist” because I agree, the mind and all this is decidedly part of the material. And importantly, social relations, the interaction between people’s lives, that’s really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the relations that govern production, the relations that govern the household, the relations that govern work-life. These are people interacting with each other. That itself has a plasticity to it. We know it has changed in the past. So bringing up the conscious element of changing, changing it now, getting out of capitalism, to me that’s what it is… And recognizing the social as well as the psyche as material is an incredibly important process.
AT: I want to wrap up by asking you about what you are working on right now. But I want to also connect that to how you are doing in the midst of the plague. Has it changed your artwork? And, have the recent uprisings affected your work or how you think about your work?
ARA: The main thing I have been working on is various Acid Left media projects which consist of tons of memes, an interview based podcast, media and art reviews, tutorials, and video essays. We want to not just to showcase left art, but also encourage an artistic left, and light that spark of creativity in the working class -- that I believe is vital to the human spirit -- while experimenting with an alternative publication that favors collaboration and challenging current notions of what it means to understand something. A good example of this is the Beyond Linguistics Reading Group. In the BLRG project we read theory and transform it into a work of art. We started with the Communist Manifesto and are currently going through the Dialectic of En. I’m very happy with this work. Our goal with this is to act in an educational way for those taking part, but also produce a sort of artistic companion for the text that others can get something out of on their own and while reading the text, something that will cross circuit the brain in a way and bridge different parts of our understanding. During the pandemic I have mostly continued to work at a grocery store. This has been incredibly stressful, which I think has slowed some of my traditional practices down. But when I am creating I’ve noticed an intenseness in the work; it’s felt more on edge. I’m still working with high levels of abstraction but it’s perhaps been less whimsical. It’s also been a great opportunity to do more online oriented work while people were initially locked down and looking for connections and outlets. I have received more messages from people interested in the intersection of art, politics, and theory than ever before. And its everyone, not just other artists. Artists want to lend their abilities to something greater than themselves and non-artists want to express their frustrations, hopes, and desires. And I think this brings the protest in. I think it’s time for more art. To give the disaffected the courage to create. The usual protest art is great, you love to see Fuck12 or BLM sprayed across monuments of hate, but even nicer is seeing the Confederate statues completely covered to the point the slogans blend to become some sort of modernist abstraction. From painting to wheatpasting I want to see art flourish during this time. Let’s not be afraid of making something sensuous or beautiful in the process of showing our disgust. There can be a tendency for Marxists to think of art as useless (whether they think that’s a positive or negative). Or to reduce it to pure propaganda. I think both are wrong steps. Someone once said “a constitution is just a poem backed by an army” and I felt that; but the poem has got to slap.
Transcribed by Tish Markley + Adam Turl
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