CJ Hunt

The work I'm submitting this time around probably appears, taken as a unified catalog of work, quite eclectic. It is I believe mostly representational, but not all; there is a lot of ink work as well as collage and acrylic painting, with varying styles, etc. I have no statement to give regarding these works as a unified assembly, nor do they form such. With that said:

Some of these works are quite explicitly conceptual; two concern artistic confrontation with the legacy of imperialism ('Ghosts of Empire,' 'What is Seen and What is Not'); a third concerns my general detestation of advertising ('The Soul of Ritz® Crackers').

The former two are concerned more specifically with the concept of tragedy and its remembrance, and the idea that which tragedies are remembered as significant and which are not has less to do with the actual magnitude or importance of tragedy and more to do with which memories are politically-economically convenient, and which inconvenient, for the capitalist ruling class and their imperialist institutions of bourgeois rule. One piece is concerned generally with the legacy of US imperialism, the other specifically with the Abu Ghraib incident-- which I'm sure some remember, but not enough. I maintain that it is all well and good for US schoolchildren to learn about what happened on 9/11/2001, but they also ought to learn about what happened on 9/11/1973. They ought to learn about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA black sites. They ought to learn about the mass murders of civilians carried out by the imperialist US military, under political leaders of both the "Democratic" and "Republican" wings of the ruling class, for the sake of the financial growth of US capital. They ought to learn about the Kunduz hospital bombing, and about Abdulrahman and Nawar al-Awlaki, etc. But, generally, they don't.

'The Soul of Ritz® Crackers' attempts to communicate to the viewer the feeling of revulsion one feels at a particular trend of advertising in which corporate entities pretend to have serious beliefs or positions, pretend to talk as if they are people (I observed, in general, a grotesque cultural trend to turn brands into people and people into brands). There is a response of disgust to something which is profoundly over-stuffed with pretenses of symbology, significance, etc., and yet which communicates in actual fact none of the things it pretends to (Ritz® Crackers, after, all HAVEN'T GOT a soul; advertisers claim to believe in all manner of principles and ideals, but in actual fact are only ever concerned with exactly one thing: the expansion of capital via sale). The advertisers write and speak, yet no meaningful words are formed-- hence I have created symbols which appear to be phonic but which signify only malignant nonsense. This, ultimately, is the problem of cultural hollowness in general in capitalism and its superstructural social order: works are created which claim to communicate this or that, but in reality the only thing they meaningfully communicate is a call for further consumption and commodity fetishism. The body is wasted and slaughtered by exploitation and imperialist war, even as the mind is alienated by hollow bourgeois culture. Such is life for the global working class and for the oppressed and exploited under capitalism and bourgeois class rule.

I should mention clearly here that any political and philosophical views expressed or alluded to in any of my artwork are my own and cannot be taken to reflect upon any other individual or group, least of all YAC as an institution.

Some others of these pieces are more concerned with a kind of general emotional expressionism. Some are just stuff I like.