Cool video man and thanks for the shoutout! I don't really use UA-cam too much but a friend of mine forwarded me this and I was cracking up over your comments about my artistic look or whatever, hahaha some funny ass shit! I wanted to point out that I do appreciate you giving me credit for my interpretation on the piece as there were several large media sites that ripped my post word for word who conveniently erased my name from the bottom of the post which was rather frustrating to try and get corrected in the first few weeks. But yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed hearing your perspective being on the whole 'robot arm' phenomenon, some objections you had on my thoughts and also that you are open to multiple perspectives on art being 'ok' beyond what the original intention that the creator of the art had. I find it interesting how a lot of people online assume that I wrote this on purpose to go viral or that I even considered that it might be in the realm of possibility - which I most certainly didn't at the time of writing. I saw the piece and created my perspective based on some quick google searches combined with some personal assumptions (the fluid looked like red hydraulic fluid that I've seen before, for instance, and I'm not an robotics or electrical engineer so I had no idea what a 'kuka servo robot' was or that they ran on electricity). I just wanted to share some of my thoughts on this cool piece of art that I stumbled across with my friends and family who I thought might also find the concept interesting as it really struck home for me personally upon viewing it. Never in a million years did I think it would have reached like 500 million collective people online or whatever the number sits at now/ be spread around by being published on big media websites, or posted on multi-million follower facebook pages, tweet chains on large twitter accounts, or have videos like this one be created and posted on youtube channels with hundreds of thousands of followers, etc. like, it has absolutely been insane and none of this was ever a thought as 'possible' in the least bit. haha - but yeah, just wanted to reach out to let you know that I do appreciate a good critique and I think you did it well here! Cheers man -Kricked aka the morman bar mitzvah dj in a disney funkopop outfit that cleans your bongs lol
Hey dude, thanks for responding and taking the roasts and criticisms in stride. I’m sure it must have been frustrating having your post copied, especially since most of the people who stole it changed some key things making it a worse interpretation. Appreciate you giving your perspective here.
Not gonna lie, i actually really find this interpretation fascinating, i am glad it was written up online and hope the lashback wasnt too brutal to deal with.
i'll be honest, this video was the first time i saw your interpretation and i found it so compelling that i was actually disappointed to learn that the hydraulics fluid thing wasn't true, haha.
I just wanted to say that I found your interpretation to be touching and meaningful, and I don't think it's less so for a couple of factual errors. I'm really glad you shared your thoughts and feelings on the piece, and I think there's something really compelling in how your post has almost become an alternative piece in its own right.
"Can't Help Myself" is a nice wordplay in English meaning both literally I cannot help myself but also have the connotation of I cannot control myself from not doing harmful behavior. I don't know if the original artists intended this, but this name sounds more sympathetic than anything else.
I *think* it was originally intended to comment on how nation-states cannot stop enforcing their borders as a function of being nation-states even as this is a futile and materially harmful act that drains resources that could instead help people.
@@Devilot109 original intent isn't the only thing that matters, these different interpretations (including the original one) are more interesting to talk about. The point of analysis isn't just finding out the true meaning
@@yemmohater2796 I mean, I think trying to suss out artistic intent behind the title, which was not clearly explained in the way the piece’s artistic intent was, is also super interesting, and just as much an act of interpretation as any other method. For saying that there are multiple ways to do analysis, you seem oddly hostile to the one I chose.
@@yemmohater2796 okay but this was a discussion of the original intent and how it could have influenced the name, even if you consider other interpretations more valuable they're irrelevant to this particular discussion because the name comes from the creator and his intent.
personally i didnt see it as violent tbh, but yeah i guess that goes to show how people can have very different interpretations i agree with the other person in the replies, i saw it more as injury or hurt, but i also saw it as not necessarily being physical injury/hurt but just in general
Idk, I quickly antropomorpyse the robot, so I didn't see it like this. But also it is probably depends on your feel about technology. I live in Russia and people here mostly technology optimistic(me extrmly included).
With the title “Can’t help myself” I think a anthropomorphic interpretation is totally valid… I thought it meant two things: I can’t stop trying to save myself and I literally can’t save myself despite my efforts. Really enjoyed your video!
Indeed. Imo Krick's interpretation was more on point than Xiaoyu Weng's. Although the chinese may be more inclined to comment on contemporary problems of surveillance, and the western view is more on the Self, unless we hear from the authors themselves, I think its fair to go with Krick's (escpecially as you said in view of the title)
I was made aware of this through Tumblr, and the thread there basically said that both the artist intent and popular interpretation are valid, because art is a dialogue in which both viewer and creator partake. I personally enjoy that communal approach.
In most people's interaction with art, it's not really a dialogue in the sense that usually, the artist does not hear what one's personal interpretation of a work is. I do agree that it is something in which both viewer and creator partake though. Partaking in art as a viewer is a skill, and it can be argued that the process of interpretation is where the art comes to life. I enjoy sometimes taking that process of creative interpretation a step further, not just applying it to intentional works of art, but also to the unintentional things that surround us, reading messages where there might be none, and conjuring inspiration from idle thought. If it doesn't speak to you, just add layers of abstraction and/or irony until it does. It's a nice exercise in taking a different perspective and enjoying the world that surrounds you. It also may help in processing stuff. Seeing these interpretations as more than they are is a bad idea though. In that direction lies madness and/or paranoia. Temper your thoughts with truth and humility if you still choose to explore that direction.
i know it made its rounds on Tumblr recently like everywhere else, but i remember seeing it YEARS ago, before it died. it had a very similar interpretation (and maybe it was the original post that resurfaced with the updated news of its death and now resurgence) plus the original intent. it's very interesting to see that, in our capitalist society, so many people interpret it as working yourself to death, while the authors live in a communist society that's completely monitored and censored. it's crazy that two completely different meanings can be applied to one art piece with complete evidence
I am and will always be an avid supporter of "art is in the eyes of the beholder", this is why i have such a gripe with people who obsessed over whats canon whats not and dont let other people have their own headcanons or interpretations of things
i think it's important to note that as the robot stops functioning the fluid has time to breech the perimeter set by the robot, and how people are more likely to sympathize with the robot in the situation rather than the fluid that's being kept at bay, never allowed to breech the perimeter.
People more likely to sympathize with the soulless system that harms people, rather than the people themselves? (to keep on the interpretation or immigration and borders)
@@vivanesca maybe to you. I definitely feel more attuned to a pile of red goo, ever oozing toward some semblance of freedom, but constantly wiped back into my suffering by forces far beyond my own ability to combat.
reminds me of yoko ono's "cut piece," an audience participation piece where one by one audience members would come up and cut away a piece of her dress. when showed this in class a lot of people (including me) interpreted it as a piece about female vulnerability and exploitation, but ono meant it to be a commentary on how as an artist she wanted to "give" to the audience (allowing them to literally take pieces of her) instead of "taking" (making art only for money, attention, etc). are either of these interpretations wrong or bad? i dont think so, and i think its a wonderful thing that art can have so many meanings, for both the artist and the viewer.
its also really interesting how the performance went really well and everybody stayed respectful in japan (i.e. it was recieved as it was meant) but totally derailed when she performed in the us so her performance in the us actually made it a commentary on partiarchy even if she didn't mean it at first
When I first came across the piece "can't help myself" it was with a different interpretation also formulated as if it was the authors intend. The interpretation was that the robot (or human) is desperately trying to keep all the liquid in the center but no matter how much the robot tries, no matter how hard he tries, the liquid glows out. Not only that but the room gets messier and messier the longer the piece is installed because of splatters and such. This was seen as a metaphor for perfectionism and trying to always have everything be perfect even if it's all getting messier and messier no matter what we do. I personally find that reading quite amazing and it makes sense to me if only the fluid wasn't red. That I think doesn't fit in with the reading I presented just now and also doesn't fit the one that's so popular right now. Red fluid, at least in my mind, is always connected to blood which in turn makes me think of violence and harm. I haven't put in the thoughts jet to interpret the piece myself but I think the colour of the liquid can not be disregarded.
Good point about the colour of the liquid. I wonder if there's an art criticism school of thought that says something like - any interpretation of an artist's work is correct as long as it accounts for and can reasonably answer questions about all aspects of the work, in the wider cultural context in which the art is placed. So an artist can even be wrong about the meaning of their own work if they did a poor job of expressing their intention with their art, as their art takes the meaning that it actually expresses rather than what was intended. Like, in this case, the robot apparently did cute dances for the audience? What's up with that? Anyway, I think that's the school of thought that I would subscribe to.
Well the reading does not necessarily contradict the intantion proclaimed by the authors as in way the idea of hard enforced borders does stem from a compulsion to rigidly compartmentalise humans and the interaction between them and the long term effect of this can be described in good conscience as "messy"
Not necessarily my view, but one way you could reconcile the red liquid with the notion of harm under the interpretation laid out here, is that perfectionism is a form of self harm? This could also coincide with how the robotic arm continually draws the red liquid towards itself. Again, not my read of the overall exhibit, but its an interesting perspective to reconcile.
ngl I read it as a metaphor for life under captialism, forever repeating tasks that are essentially meaningless but are also necessary just to keep living? Especially with the task essentially being one so common to menial labor, cleaning up a mess. The robot arm plus the blood also gave the vibe of that clinical detachment from real violence that is so pervasive in captialism. We bleed, we watch each other bleed, we ignore those across the world who bleed, but we can't even help ourselves. not alone at least.
You mean CORPORATISM. Capitalism is fantastic when regulated appropriately. A local business or an artist selling their work is capitalism as an example. Don't be a commie. It doesn't work.
I'm laughing because I actually did see this at the Venice bienniale (my universitys Art department sponsored a trip for some of us) and it was incredible, and I'm so happy the internet has blown it up, as mistaken as the interpretations are, because it is extremely rare for a piece of contemporary art to reach that many people who are not involved in an art context. We did short presentations in front of some of the installations, and I actually did mine on this work! Can't wait to see what you have to say about it.
Haha same, I was there in 2019 with my Uni Art department as well! This year I'm graduated, unemployed and in a pandemmy, but I bought the 2021 Biennialle tickets bc nothing is stopping me, it was such a great experience! And the way this video started is even more fuel to get there
Same!! Not from uni but because I'm literally venetian and I go to the Biennale every year. And I agree that it's great to see some of the pieces casually becoming popular and talked about even outside of sppecific spaces! I'm no art expert myself, but I love seeing different kinds of things and trying to interpret them.
@@nathanwaibel454 there is a difference between intent and interpretation. the artists intent versus our/the viewer/art consumer’s interpretation. that’s why it’s called interpretation lol
I saw a worker trying desperately to survive until it died. Pretty sure that’s totally what I’m personally bringing to it, but fuck it, I’m a struggling artist too, and I’ll read whatever I damn well please into it thank you very much.
I see a worker that was made to value a pointless goal, working itself to death over it, and failing, by the will of the person who imprisoned it there. As outside observers, we know that containing the fluid accomplishes nothing, we see no end in sight for this task, and we know that this entire scenario was designed by someone. And on a meta level, we know that a robot which didn't perform the task so faithfully and fruitlessly would indeed be reprogrammed or replaced. So though it might as well clean up the edges and call it a day, or even splash around and paint with the fluid, straying from its Sisyphean task would pose an existential risk to itself. The robot might not know this, but the viewer knows it almost implicitly. I love when art's most powerful statement to the viewer is something the viewer wants to scream at the art before realizing they needed to scream it at themself as well. I want to tell the robot that its existence is one of meaningless, fleeting success, lasting failure, and compounding frustration. That humans built this cruel hell as a message to ourselves, and the message is that we belong in it, but that message is a lie.
In effects, the border patrol agents / militarized police are themselves workers doomed to never finishing their jobs, though of course they are somewhat better paid than the people they 'enforce' These guys will forever be forced to risk themselves to accomplish a goal set by their wealthy benefactors to never be complete, and yet most believe that goal as the prime purpose to their efforts and not whatever reality that supposedly lies beyond
@@simonholmes841 bro you could totally apply a sort of like Marxist Lacanian that sort of analysis to this interpretation like how the capitalist system gets workers to do meaningless tasks believing that it’s sole purpose in life but also like the philosophical and psychological implications of that which is expressed through the art
Same, I see a worker doing an ultimately arbitrary and pointless job while occasionally being able to enjoy a bit of life via ‚happy dances‘ (seriously, how do happy dances fit into the original intent of representing a state apparatus and surveillance technology?).
I had just expressed a few days ago about how I felt like I was losing more and more of myself. That life keeps taking pieces and there's no way to keep up. This robot, while definitely not what the author intended, it puts an abstract feeling I've been struggling with into such a concrete and powerful form.
not exactly the same, but if you liked this piece you might like untitled (portrait of ross in la) by felix gonxales-torrez! it has a similar concept of taking pieces of a person.
I saw it and interpreted it as a sort of desperation - trying to contain everything that's going wrong despite the fact that it just gets harder and harder, and the longer you do it the harder it is to feel like you've done everything properly. like being overwhelmed and struggling so much that it literally bleeds out of you, while other people watch on and you both hope that nobody sees it, and that someone does and comes to help. And the people walking by either don't care or can't help. Or that it was about keeping your emotions or internal self bottled up - it's not going to work and you just have to keep on trying to sweep them out of sight. I honestly didn't realise there was another interpretation, and i feel like i empathise too much with it to view the robot in a negative light. It's not harmful, it's in pain Not sure it's a good sign that i want to hug this robot tbh
yeah, I like those interpretations, and if it is bad to want to hug the robot, I guess you can at least feel something in that I too would want to hug it
the first time i saw it, sans any of the context, just video of the robot and nothing else - i saw it as a representation of anxiety. your description is exactly spot-on. trying desperately to hold everything together and appear okay while inside you're completely overwhelmed and seconds away from breaking down into a panic.
I find the robot very uncomfortable to watch for too long, but I can't figure out why. I don't know if it matters, but my mother worked as a cleaner/caretaker for years, and later doing whatever she could to supplement her meagre disability benefits. My brothers both have ADD, and I probably have it too, though undiagnosed. I think these facts contribute to my empathizing more with the robot. Probably too much - like I said, watching it for too long makes me uncomfortable in a way I find difficult to nail down. I just want to find the off switch, clean up the mess and then turn it back on to see what it does when there's no red liquid. Why am I crying?
Sir i would like to say: i feel the most empathy for you. Which is like, the first time i’ve had empathy for someone on the internet i have had in a long time
I think the general idea behind that guy's interpretation is very much sound. However, my immediate criticism of it would be how he phrased it like it WAS the authorial intent. It doesn't read as "this is how I interpreted it and how it made me feel" but "I read this on the placard next to it". I think regardless of where you stand on art interpretation, it's pretty easy to see why imposing your own reading as the author's intent is maybe a bit disingenuous. Still, it's unlikely he was expecting such a big audience - virality's a bitch. It was weird watching the start of this video having only seen the actual authorial description of the piece on a DIFFERENT viral spread of this installation, not remembering the details, and thinking "oh shit was that not true?" Then realising "okay this doesn't sound familiar, I'm pretty sure there was violence and blood splattering involved". I agree that the message intended isn't clear without context, although I do think it allows you to form an opinion similar to the "false" one and then wrestle with both interpretations in a way that actually works quite well. I think they marry together to make an interesting whole, and the futility and draining of life of the machine itself could easily be an unstated reading of the piece
totally agree - about the phrasing, i think that's a specific phenomenon of our time and the context. I feel like if an art critique writes a text on an artwork they don't have to constantly say "that's my opinion" because it should be implied but at the same time if something goes viral it seems much more likely for people to read clear authorical intent into an interpretation. don't wanna go all media literacy on this but there is some connection to how people unfamiliar with contemporary art can perceive it as obscure (which tbf is true sometimes) and are often asking get a straight answer as to what it is "about".
@@AlbertSirup I think the difference here is that the viral version stated factual errors about the actual construction/function of the robot. By stating that it was leaking the fluid, and that it needed to keep pulling that back in in order to keep functioning, it's really hard for any reader to discern that this is just an interpretation, and not the literal truth. Like, if I saw a painting, where I had no idea about the details of the actual production/materials, but I decided to tell people the artist had gathered dirt from their yard to work into the paint, just because I thought it looked kind of gritty with natural earth tones, I feel like that would cross over from "my interpretation" to "just making stuff up". If you took me at my word, that would easily influence your interpretation of the painting.
Yeah, I mean I posted it on my personal fb account to friends and family and then on my personal instagram account immediately afterwards because I just wanted to see if my friends could relate or see what I was talking about in regards to the symbolism. I wasn't trying to write it in a way that seemed like it was coming from the original creator of the art, I was writing it as myself coming from me via my personal profiles. In retrospect, I can see how people made that assumption after it reached well beyond my little community of friends because people automatically assume that something that is going viral is going viral for a reason and that it MUST expand further beyond the writer behind it, because 'it wouldn't be going viral otherwise'. Giving anything and everything you see a sort of 'news story-telling' vibe about it...even though it can truly just be a few thoughts from a random dude on the internet that got randomly blown up. haha, anywho - cheers Arthur
@@coriander_sun hmm i get it, but in case of "can't help myself", from what i understand, it wouldn't be obvious where the liquid comes from just by looking at it, no? so even if it's technically wrong, i don't think it's in bad faith necessarily because it seems like a valid interpretation one could have seeing the work (i.e. they didn't necessarily lie about their aesthetic experience). but you're right in terms of such a statement changing the approach to interpretation by making the work seem more about the apparatus (the machine "really dies") and less about potential metaphorical meanings beyond that
Okay, first impressions on the piece: to me, it’s ‘about’ how things like Boston Dynamics’s robots are designed to sell you death and destruction while playing on your fascinations, and giving you something to blame that can’t fight back, or can’t be fought. ‘I can’t help myself from doing what I do, I was programmed to do this.’ It’s putting a spotlight on a state that would do this. Give a killing machine a happy little dance so people are distracted from what it’s cleaning. I thought it was a bit blunt to be honest.
I think you managed to hit on the through line the artists were using, thinking others might find the same way there. I think that using an industrial construction robot to clean up while being fixed in place hits different for most people than the fully mobile BD machines do. Who was it who said "Context is everything"? I think the "rooted industrial worker that dances on occasion" element of the robot comes in from a different direction than the "military contractor builds spookily naturalistic machines" element
@@weatheranddarkness I suppose! Thank you for your interpretation. I thought that the industrial robot was naturalistic, if not in the same vein as BD’S robots, but still human like. You can see that by the poster’s original response. That makes it more insidious to me.
I'm glad that my uncle from the 90s shows up every now and again to discuss art and politics. Very impressed at how well he's aging too! I hope I got some of those genes.
Honestly the gnome DJ's reading isn't a bad reading. The idea that people are treated like machines and worked to death, being forced to not enjoy the whimsy of life is a case for this art that can be well argued and I enjoy this take.
@@heartycoffee4754 I think it's bc he's the author (harhar) of the fb and insta post that brought attention to the Robot Arm (mentioned in the video). that being said, since that isn't immediately clear the post does come off weirdly. lol almost like his post that sparked the initial controversy eh? 😂
@@cheshirecandy thx momecat i hope u find true love, wealth, and r free from disease. idk just trying to spread positivity over internet + maybe it will come true
As an artist, you have to understand that your intentions behind your piece is only half the equation. I had several pieces in art school that were completely misinterpreted only to be told "that's too bad, bud" when i corrected people. All you should really care about it that the work impacted someone in some way, not what way it impacted them.
My reading of the piece is that it is a commentary on the monetization of one's suffering. The walls that hold the robot arm act as a stage, with viewers coming just to see the art piece which is containing its fluid which represents its blood/pain, instead of remedying its pain
I saw can’t help myself in a few different ways. My immediate reaction was “oh it’s about machines replacing the workforce, while perpetuating the capitalist system we live in, as it is brought in to also clean up after the destruction it caused,” before beginning to think about the fact that, no, the robot does not have a brain. It is not sentient. It did not cause the harm. Someone, a person, *used* the robot to cause harm. And they’re using it to clean up after both itself and themself. After that I started seeing it not in terms of the state and immigration, but in terms of the technocrats and subjugating the rest of the populace. Few people with the wealth and power enough to use the tool of a robot arm have decided not to use it for the betterment of society, but to harm society. All while putting on a nice, pretty little show for everyone onlooking. Look at it dance! Ignore what else it’s doing! *They* don’t want you to see that. Then after you mentioned the fact of taking into account its expense and where it was displayed, I began to think of rich people viewing horrors in action behind nice protective glass in a nice, safe, and clean area. Also it made me think my original initial reaction of it relating to factory line worker obsolescence might be more in line with what a lot of in person viewers may have thought.
i always thought i cant help myself was about self destruction, like addiction, self harm, etc. the title "i cant help myself" is such a perfect way to convey how it feels to be dealing with self destructive habits, you know its bad but at the same time you cant stop, you cant control yourself. the life cycle of the robot also works well imo. the robot starts out happy and enjoying life, even enjoying cleaning up the blood. very similar to how at the start of ur path into self harm or addiction, its fun and you think you can stop whenever you wont so theres no worry, but as time goes on it stops being fun and starts being a burden. you end up spending most of ur time either doing or thinking about self harm or any other addiction much like how later in its life the robot now only has time to keep cleaning.
I think the post-writer's interpretation/emotional response is as valid as any, but I do take issue with how the post states a number of things as fact which simply aren't true (not hydraulic fluid, not required to keep machine running). The post also frames the poster's interpretation as if it is the artist's intended message, rather than the viewer's own interpretation. The interpretation is an interesting one and one that (aside from the just plain incorrect details) seems to fit the piece, but the way it is framed is at least somewhat deceptive (whether on purpose or not)
@@mtlewis973 the issue being discussed is not *that* he interpreted the piece of art, but how the interpretation was framed - i.e. portraying it as the artist's intention rather than his personal interpretation; as well as getting some factual details wrong.
@@lulu4882 i don’t buy that at all. subjectivity is implied. if you’re reading someone talking about art you’re reading their interpretation. ok it makes you look a bit 2010s tumblr but there are worse things
@@mtlewis973 i'm not selling anything lol. "subjectivity is implied." i don't think this is necessarily true. everyone's interpretation *is* subjective, but people very often explicitly portray their interpretation as the "intended" or "correct" one, and that tone does serve to diminish/dissuade discussion of other interpretations. the way he fabricated facts based on quick assumptions (like claiming the liquid is hydraulic fluid the robot needs to keep operating) leads the reader to believe that his is the "intended" interpretation, which is what i take issue with. it's not the biggest deal in the world and obviously he didn't anticipate it to go viral, but people should be careful to get their facts straight if they're going to post shit publicly on the internet in general. this is a relatively harmless instance of spreading misinformation but it did serve to flatten discussion about this complex piece of art and obfuscate its political edge.
I think another interesting aspect about considering authorial intent is that it's the galleries, museums, art curators that actually decide what information about an artist to show, where to show, how to show it, etc. So even the basis for authorial intent deals with a entity that isn't the viewer or artist
Yeah, imho this is a big part of how the figure of the "auteur" in authorial intent and auteur theory is constructed under capitalism - galleries, museums, etc. are incentivized to create a public image of a given artist's persona (or brand) that can be "sold" to the public to increase demand for the works credited to that artist as commodities, and commodities related to those works (museum trips, tours of the artist's house, merchandise and reproductions of the works, etc).
So often art is up to the interpretation of the time, and it makes perfect sense that this piece got around during the pandemic. We are all worked to our limits, told to bleed and die for our corporate overlords just to keep a roof over our heads. Like, I think that the initial artist's intent also makes sense, but I think it makes more sense when it originally came out, whether or not the time was explicitly intended to be a part of the piece. The time aspect of it depicts a certain desperation that is uniquely human/animalistic. The more literal "blood is used to keep the corporate machine flowing" works, but so does the interpretation that we are told to hold ourselves together without even a bucket to keep our guts in.
Not just the time it was made, but also the cultural context of the viewers. It might be more obvious to a person living in a place like China that this is a piece about surveillance states and the violence of borders, but a middle class white person living in America probably isn’t thinking about those things as much and would be less likely to consider those things when coming to conclusions about the meaning of this piece.
I first saw the piece on tumblr, with a similar chain of anthropomorphizing interpretations, though slightly different, and lacking the misinformation about the red fluid being lubricant. I did personally see the piece as more of a representation of self destructive behaviors, or of the idea of working one's self to death, on a task that is ultimately pointless and trying harder actually makes the task more difficult, the red fluid becomes more and more splattered beyond the reach of the robot as it tries to keep it contained. In a way the red fluid could also be read as being traits of ourselves that we don't like, the more we try to hide them, and make ourselves "pleasing" the more they just leak out and make a mess that's beyond our ability to fix. I think the fact that its called "cant help myself" and got renamed to "couldn't help myself" after it broke down does a lot in swaying people towards these sort of interpretations. There some powerful word-play going on with both. Since I also knew the piece was intended to be someone political I did also a read a kind of statement of the futility of capitalism into all this. We are forced to work pointless tasks, in a way that just makes things worse, we cant help ourselves, and one day we just shut down and die. I guess its a bit "obvious" to interpret a piece featuring a machine doing a task to be about how capitalism makes us feel, but actually watching this robot try it best, do little dances, hear the screaming of the machinery, and still it "couldn't help itself" is just really sad.
My personal reading of the piece, before I knew about the authorial intent, was about individual vulnerability, dehumanization, and the societal pressure to always be 'okay'. The robot is constantly bleeding, which reads that they've been hurt, but they are programmed to clean it up themselves and perform little dances for the audience. The title feels, if anything, apologetic: Sorry, Just Can't Help Myself! Like someone compulsively apologizing for their own pain, and the difficulty and vulnerability it must be causing on everyone else, it tries to hide the evidence of its wounds as best it can, and distracts people from how much it needs help by performative happiness. (Which is a common habit in those of us who have experienced abuse...) Just as our pain and vulnerability is a messy and often gruesome experience, the robot's blood is never completely cleaned up; they'll never stop bleeding unless someone else helps them, but the audience views them as nonhuman and has no sense of responsibility or compassion towards its pain. The expectation is that it will solve its own problems, but the flow is too strong for it to ever get under control. Eventually it is exhausted by this dance and stops performing happiness/doing dances, having lost the energy to do even the bare minimum to still look okay. In the end, having never been helped, it dies on stage. My reading is pretty strongly informed by my experiences of abuse, untreated PTSD, and suicidal ideation (among myself and my peers) so it's definitely me bringing additional context to the table! I wouldn't expect everyone to have the same response, but it isn't too dissimilar from the viral post's reading. It also fits in well with other people's readings of working class exploitation- I especially liked the 'blood for the machine' reading. While I understand what the authors were going for, I agree that trying to make anarchist commentary by...spending a huge budget on a robot arm, anthropomorphizing the arm's movements, and then showing it off at prestigious European art institutions...sort of defeats the message? Plus Western culture (such as it is) skews towards individualism, so it should be expected a Western audience in a Western art institution is going to default to an individualist reading, especially when you make the robot move like an individual and give the piece a title that assigns it an ego. I don't think it's a coincidence that the art went viral with that kind of reading. While they may have meant to talk about border violence (which I do think is an essential thing to talk about), they went about it in such a way that, all and all, doesn't seem to have been particularly successful. But hey, they made a deeply compelling piece about mental health and the dehumanization of the working class, soooo mission failed successfully?
5:03 honestly the musicians take on it sounded like how living under capitalism feels. Fuck how MY life feels. Constantly going, breaking more and more both physically and mentally, never having time to oneself, and yet having no choice but to continue.
As a writer and a trans person, I think it's interesting that the shift away from schools of criticism focused on authorial intent just so happened to coincide with the period of time when access to authorial platforms began to diversify. A part of me wonders whether this change might have something to do with academia's (and the privileged class as a whole's) reticence to treat marginalized members of society as "authorities" on anything, least of all the art that they produce.
Yes, although it could also be that the construct of the "auteur" figure in auteur theory implies hierarchies formed by factors like perceived talent/perceived and presumed competency, personality/charisma and "relatability," and other stuff that culture teaches us to associate primarily with white, cishet, abled, (mostly) Christian-background men. We're more likely to see members of this group as auteurs, and the figures we raise to auteur status who are from this group help to reinforce the idea that these people are the auteurs. When the idea that these people are more talented than everyone else starts to be more widely-challenged, I think it can challenge the validity of auteurs as an idea, overall.
Urghh I love both these takes!!! Tbh I love the impact this “death of the author” concept has brought, which in my opinion boils down to people enjoying art unconstrained by the confines of an artist’s original meaning, which, when done right, can elevate our experience of the artwork so much more. But I also understand the frustration with the increasing lack of recognition for and appreciation of artists and the intent/care they imbued their work with, especially given how anti-intellectualism and a sort of “why do you care? it’s not that deep” sentiment seems to reign over us in an age where we have an unprecedented access to art created by people of so many backgrounds and places, not simply the hierarchical, exclusionary position that informs our traditional view of the Author.
Coming at this from an MFA back ground who's sat in on several studio critiques, I think both the audience impression and the author's intention are valid and important. What was the overlap and difference between the viewer's impression and the artist intension was the crux of almost every conversation.
This is the sort of thing I find fascinating too. While my own views tend to "value" the artist's intention more than the interpretation as "the truth" I think the way that the work is interpreted is its own layer of truth, especially since the artist did not declare "THIS IS WHAT I MEAN" before the people were allowed to view the piece.
'Gnome who sneaks into your house to clean your bong while you're asleep' and 'Funko pop of a disney adult' fucking killed me already god damn that's some accurate shit
i actually don't think the author's intended message falls short at all with the robot's 'human' actions. humanity makes machines out of ourselves designed towards obscene violence and still manages to make those institutions pantomime humanity-they have cheery ads, social media, etc, where they might tell jokes, do a dance, etc, and the people involved all are humans with human friends and family, so therefore their work may seem human to those people who see them in human contexts. and all the while, the institution they maintain is responsible for an unending spill of violence that they try to sweep (like the machine!) under the rug. we, the audience, might be inclined to miss the blood for the cheery pantomime of humanity and human emotion. we forget the huge, hulking machine for its happy dancing, we miss the blood for pitying the hard work and stress the robot endures. we might miss the blood of others in perceiving the blood (sweat, and tears) of the robot. none of this is at odds with that mormon dj at a bar mitzvah's interpretation.
i really like this interpretation! it also makes sense given the medium of a robot. i think it makes the audience (or at least me) able to detach from the empathy i feel towards it if i'm reminded that that its still a hunk of metal at the end of the day, just like how we're able to stop empathizing with institutions of violence if we're reminded that they're just institutions.
As a literary scholar, I think you did an excellent job explaining the basic theories. It sounded a lot like my first day in masters classes. You can tell you did a lot of research..
This was my favorite video of yours. I laughed out loud twice and learned a lot for someone with a bachelor's of English. I also see the piece in an anarchist light. The Futility of Work. No matter how much you do, you're never done until you're too broken to continue.
The Robot keeping the blood in it's boundaries, is in part a survival mechanism when understood as the state surveilance and borders mechanism, since.. if borders aren't keeping anyone in, they aren't really there, so the state dies. a state bleeding out is absolutely a powerful image in this context, and it's kind of cool that the post pointed this out. It seems however anti intellectual to make up this whole functionality about lubricant, happy dances and the degradation of the piece as part of it, specifically to muddy the meaning and make it more banal? I don't know the answer here, i'm just a frustrated student of art history conflicted about the implications of art going viral in the mainstream while being sort of misrepresented to achieve that? :(
It's not really true though. States predate any kind of enforced borders. For most of human history, enforcing border controls has been too difficult to really be possible
When you're watching a video essay and someone shouts out your uni. Much love from University of Sussex. And I can attest: The protests were completly non violent and the """worst""" thing I saw was CHALK grafitti around the library square ground on an open day, telling people not to come to the uni because it supported TERFS lol.
i’ve heard some interesting things about this piece. if i remember correctly, it used to wave and dance to people while scraping up just a little bit of fluid but over time as the amount of fluid increased it slowly started to have less time to be all happy dancing and stuff. after a while it’s just scraping the fluid just barely managing to keep up until it dies. i heard a theory that it was about how people slowly start to deteriorate because they find they have less time to do what they enjoy and instead only focus on working to just “scrape” by. i found out that the fluid wasn’t even essential to keep it living; we’re so enveloped in work that we forget to enjoy what we’re working for in the first place.
I've fallen in love with this version of Our Retired Explorer and once the musicians you commissioned posts it I'd love to get a link to it or a place I can buy it. It's just beautiful
I only know this from a viral Tumblr post that was just a copy paste of the actual art description and hearing the other side of the internet's interpretation of it is wild
Reddit is at least nicely compartmentalized and if you just want to scroll through pictures of cats with their arms hanging down all you have to do is go to r/danglers or something
Eh I'd say Twitter's worse. Reddit they might call you a stupid cuck incel for disagreeing about Zack Snyder's Superman. But at least not a large percentage of them aren't trying to ruin people's lives over the most petty shit. Honestly the worst part about Reddit is the hive mind that often causes misinformation
First thought was "Automation killing the workers now, eh?" Then i thought how in a future space station there will be a sweeping robot doing this as it doesn't realize its on a doomed vessel. Its human enticing dances being played to empty halls
The Group of Seven paintings being empty to show Canada as empty before colonization rings true to me. Here in the US we had the Hudson River School, which basically did the same thing. Very popular and dramatic beautiful landscapes that are almost completely devoid people. Romanticizing the land without acknowledging the native people who live there
When I first saw images/video of Can't Help Myself, I thought of "Bullshit Jobs" and minimum wage, the robot cleaning up the fluid for really no purpose other than its what its commanded to do, steadily growing more tired and less efficient until it dies/is decommissioned. The artists intent is really interesting, and I'm looking forward to reading more about them, but from my experience working various bullshit jobs, it just immediately resonated with me in that way. Even the voyeurism of the onlookers/audience reflects in how I felt being viewed as a machine by both customers and management. Absolutely fantastic vid as always, I've pinned some of the texts mentioned for further reading because this was super sick all around.
I'm so tantalised by your final brief comments about prestigious art exhibition spaces and what vested interests they might have in the works they choose to exhibit or commission. I'd love to see you do a video about that and how it effects public understanding of art and art criticism, if you felt you had further points to make. Really enjoyed this one, as usual!
Almost anytime I hear Jacques Derrida's name, "Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)" by The Weakerthans gets stuck in my head. So I found it immensely satisfying that this video's end credits featured a really cool Will Jarvis cover of that song. I don't hear a lot of Weakerthans covers in general.
Huh, I saw this in person. I'm not much of an art person, but me and my family visited the Guggenheim since we were visiting New York and it was a Thing To See. I remember we walked into the room and I got a creeped out feeling when I saw it, and then we looked at each other and laughed it off. It was pretty neat to watch.
Unlike these other uncouth viewers, I'm only commenting after watching the entire video. I especially enjoyed the part where you looked at that one thing and meaningfully related it to that other more abstract thing and then really really talked about society.
My immediate thought when I saw the piece was that it represented the struggle or even impossibility of one person to mitigate the harm that is being done around the world. I saw the the robot as a politically active individual and the blood-like substance as all of the injustice in the world at once. So while the morals of the robot arm drove it to attempt to "clean up" it was never possible to clear the mess. Hence the title "Can't Help Myself"
In a critical thinking class in high school I wrote a paper where I talked about deconstructionism, and how the meaning and authority of Derrida's own writing had to be deconstructed as well, and then the thing I was writing had to be deconstructed as I was writing it, and it was sort of an ouroboros, a paper eating itself in a tongue in cheek way. My teacher basically said they couldn't tell if it was dumb or brilliant, which I took as a compliment.
i view cant help myself as a symbol of addiction and codependency with those around the addict. the viewer becomes the bystander of the robot arm's addiction to it's work, thinking that it is caring for itself, but really just wasting it's time and energy! hehe
I suppose my interpretation of it is largely influenced by its title, Can't Help Myself. I thought it was supposed to represent a serial killer feeling shame as they mechanically go about cleaning up another crime scene they created. They hate having to go through this endless clean up process, but like the title says...."I can't help myself". So on and on it goes.
i thought of can't help myself being about trauma. like, a constant deluge of memories that becomes so overwhelming that sometimes you can't even move. you keep things together, but no matter how much coping mechanisms you have, how much support, how much therapy, how much meds, it's always going to be there. and you can never clean up that blood.
Look, the video essay was excellent, accessible, etc. But my real takeaway continues to be my introduction to Will Jarvis via that damn ending song at 34:05 that I've listened to nine times and counting.
Completely unrelated, but is your profile pic a pride flag, or something else? It's really pretty and if it's for an ace identity I've never heard of, I'd love to know which one (I'm a question ing young ace myself)
@@bird2793 Well hi there! Yeah, that flag's specifically for aroace. Mind you, I like the standard ace flag, but I think this one looks like a sunset, which is perfect because every aroace I've ever met likes sunsets better than dating. I wish you the best of luck figuring yourself out! It took me years to figure out what was going on with me, but I didn't have the resources that are available now. I do hope your time is smooth sailing! Remember, there's no harm in taking your time to figure these things out.
@@aceofspades3533 Thank you so much!!! This flag also reminds me of the People's Flag of Milwaukee, which is supposed to represent the sun rising over Lake Michigan (Which I've come to love it even more since starting at UWM and seeing the horrible current flag in front of the library everyday.) Thanks for the advice, too...I'm on the spectrum, so I probably just value different things than other people in relationships, etc. I think the song "Marry Me, A Little" from Company sums up my attitudes pretty well. Thank you, again, and I hope you have a good weekend.
as someone who's physically disabled with a degenerative condition, it makes me think a lot about the futility of physical therapy for me. i'm trying so hard to keep my body working well, to the point that i'm exhausting myself and almost making things worse in the process. but i can't help myself, i don't want to decay while i'm still in here. things just get more and more unmanageable as i get more and more exhausted, but the harder it gets to contain the liquid/keep myself running well enough to get through my day-to-day, the harder i have to work in order to stay at a consistent level of ability, thus exhausting myself more and the cycle goes on and on
I feel like author's intention should still factor in somewhat. Without the creator, we wouldn't have the art in the first place so I think it does matter we get an idea of what he's thinking.
The thing is that, if this was the case, what's the point of making art? Art is about expression and interpretation. Is it good to know the author's intent? Absolutely. However, the truly important part is the interpretation of the art. There is art everywhere that is interpreted differently from the authors' intention.
@@whodis2614 But it is only an opinion that art is about interpretation, and it can be argued the more weigh you give you interpretation the more you take away from expression; which some would argue is the primary purpose of the art.
I certainly as a writer who puts a lot of thought into my metanarratives would find it sad if no reader was even a little bit curious as to what I was trying to say. That being said, the reader drawing their own conclusions based on what they themselves bring to the table is not only desirable but absolutely inevitable.
Then we can‘t parse the meaning of any text where we don‘t know anything of the author. Obviously there‘s different texts where different lenses are interesting. Intent can be valuable to analyze. But sometimes it can be totally disregarded and it‘s great.
I don't think it should be necessary. An artist's intent could also be to hide their intent. That's what I did in my poetry classes. Wrote down a "story", buried in symbolism, and cut like 80% of it. The best feedback I got was basically: "I have no idea what this is about, but I enjoyed it." It's a very zen approach to creating art. So if Stock argues that the art is a set of instructions to find authorial intent, I might say "Why can't it be a set of instructions for finding something else, and why should I need to know what that is?" Indeed, if the reader finds something they value, does it ultimately matter if I didn't put it there? That is also how I enjoy art. I like abstract paintings, poetry, music, and so on. I often enjoy music more when I'm just listening to the melody and sounds, including vocals, but when I find out the lyrics, the music usually loses something, because the meaning they convey clashes with my experience. I can also enjoy art that states its intent in various degrees of clarity, but that type of art caters to a very different need.
My introduction to this piece was through the clickbait-y description, which I found very resonant when viewed through the lense(s) of a person with chronic illness, physical disability, neurodiversity, and trauma. The "dancing" being a pretty clear metaphor for the "masking" that society insists on to hide pain, anxiety, or just being different. And the gradual breakdown of the robotic arm as it lost it's hydraulic fluid being the fight against entropy in a universe that cares nothing for you and will keep on after you aren't able to hold all of your cells together any longer. But state violence, surveillance, and oppression also work as a reading too. 🤷
I saw this piece as being stuck in a day to day grind where the work never ends and nothing new happens. I also find it really frustrating because it cleans so slowly and ineffectively and it makes me wanna get in there and help the poor thing
What a great essay. You never cease to impress me with how effectively you can synthesize complex concepts like post-structuralism or conflict theory, and even more impressively, how you can talk in an engaging and even funny manner about distressing subjects like colonialism or reality shows.
This was super interesting! There are too many videos that shun the death of the author so I felt like I was doing something wrong by still liking works by authors who are known jerks etc. I am trying to get published myself (in Japan with a major publishing company, its very difficult but I'm getting there...) so when I write something its been drilled in my heas by teachers, editors, and fellow artists that it is your work until its published, then its open to as many interpretations as possible which is why you should try to make your intent as clear as possible. However I have also learned that humans cannot mind read. And its a lie that we tell ourselves that we could even know exactly the author's intent. But I do think its polite to figure out where the author was coming from when they created their piece. You'll never know exactly what the intent was. On top of that, art is a form of communication. Communication is a skill. So even communicating your idea so its understood is a challenge and you might accidentally be saying stuff you didn't realize you were saying. Like Bridgerton feels like it was trying to be inclusive, perhaps the intent was inclusivity, but the way it was actually presented did not execute that intent very well at all. But art and human communication are not that easy. Anyway I like using art as a tool of inspiration. I check whatever the author said about the work (which can also be interpreted, again, there's no way for me to truly know their actual intent just what I perceive their intent to be) then I make conclusions based on the imagery given to me and my initial reaction to it. Then I've decided what the work means to me and I enjoy it. Its a personal experience. Because of that the Scarlet Letter read as like a fantastical Disney movie, Dracula and the Count of Monte Cristo give me the same fancy old opulence vibe, and Berserk is a shoujo manga. None of these are acceptable from most point of views but I have evidence for my readings of them just like anyone else. Art is multifaceted. Humans are multifaceted. Sorry for the super long comment. I dunno how to express my idea concisely.
I love being able to recognize the voices of my other favorite creators. I'm only a few minutes in but I'm already like, "Awww, who is this soft spoken young man? Is that Noah Samsen?"
My personal take on all of this is that it actually depends on the piece, like, some pieces of art are designed to make it impossible to have a diferent interpretation than the artist like most mainsetream movies, where as others, like the eric andre show, dont even have a meaning at all by the creator of the piece, i think we should see each piece with all context of it and then decide how we should critisise it or interpret it, but thats just my opinion and take, i just think each person should defenetly be free to consume art however they want and interpret it the same way, as long as they arent hurting anyone
Ah when you said kathleen stock I litreally shivered, not a single mainstream media interviewed any of us the protested or gave an actual attempt to understand the reasons we were protesting. And the email the univerisity sent after she finally quit was disgusting, expressing there saddness at the 'loss' of her, disapointment at the students and facility that joined the protest, and finally congratulating her extensive 'gender critcal' writing. They did not once mention the transphobe or trans students safety during this entire time.
I feel like the dishes bit was just a gag; but imagining the world where you're co-authoring a script with your roommate and they bug you about the dishes in it actually seems to me like it would rank lower than putting up signs in the ranking of passive aggressive dish related discourse. Because signs are a level of lack of trust I refuse to participate in at my home.
Haha, the whole Kathleen Stock part is perfect, having seen the protest in person I can confirm that your evaluation that she was making a mountain out of a molehill is 100% accurate. Reports really made it seem a rampage
it feels notable to me that the "state mechanism enforcing borders" and "anthropomorphized machine burning itself out because its purpose is an impossible task" aren't contradictory readings. in fact, when we combine them, there's plenty of room to inspect why it's easier to relate to the machine that (at first, but then slowly less so) imitates a human than to the fluid that has no ability past trying to leave, and how that relates to our willingness to personify governments while dehumanizing "floods" of refugees. i'm far from committed to this read as definitive or sole, but i appreciate parr's addition to the piece with this reaction
Is there a school of thought that recognizes that each mind's relationship to signifiers is unique and that information cannot be translated between two minds without some level of loss? People who believe that authorial intent is paramount don't seem to understand that authorial intent is written in a language that no one but that author spoke at that point in time.
what you're saying reminds me of information theory- at least, my professor brought it up in this general context. on wikipedia, it looks like it refers more to comp sci stuff, but I can definitely see it applying more broadly to other things. Interestingly, the point my professor was making was that Information Theory is so engrained in our culture that it's kind of hard to even notice (and that we should be skeptical of it). is it accurate that the author first has an original idea, then attempts to "beam it" to the audience (with minimal noise), or is the idea/work developed/grown in collaboration with the materials and tools? confusing stuff, not sure what I believe-- just thought it might be of interest!
This is somewhat a part of reader response, and is common now in media studies and even fandom studies departments. It argues that the reader is the home of meaning, so it follows that each reading/meaning created is contingent on the individual and their context
I interpreted it as someone trying to solve a massive problem they have on their own either refusing help or just not getting any until they eventually break
THANK YOU for the huge dork payoff of having a cover of "Our Retired Explorer" as the end credits! My John K. Samson-infused brain immediately went there when you mentioned Derrida- also, a very cool analysis of... Analysis and interpretation in the expensive and fascinating world of modern installation art- do a whole video on this particular kind of wealth criminal!
Two thoughts come to mind, the first is my reading of it as a worker struggling to survive and then finally breaking down and dying. The other thought has to do with how much this conversation about art criticism reminds me of conversations about what art is as a whole. I'm sure there's many people that would see this beautiful piece of art and claim it's not art because it's not a painting
I’m not a visual artist, but I do compose music mostly for ensembles including voice. There’s definitely intention behind my works and the texts that inform/accompany them, especially in one I’m writing right now because it’s very explicitly political. In general though, I don’t have much of an issue with interpretations that might differ from what the artist had intended. However, I also think that acknowledging the creator’s intended message when discussing personal interpretations is a good thing to do because of the work and dedication it takes to produce a work. To me, neither the artist nor the consumer can have complete and total control over the meaning of a work (nor should they, really) because communication in any medium, creative or not, necessarily involves two people with different experiences which will inform how they view a piece of art.
I think the problem most people had with the copypasta was that it was not presented as "an interpretation", but as "the intended interpretation" which is not the same thing
Taking somewhat of the creators intentions into consideration while still going with the ‘endless toil’ vibe to the piece, this is my own interpretation; I see the robot arms constant raking of the blood like fluid as the violence of the state seeking to solve problems but naturally only adding to and even perpetuating those existing problems. Much like the military and/ or the police taking actions to “sweep up” after damage they did comes to light (like police using body cams or the US military “helping to rebuild” places like Iraq) only to have these bits of theater do absolutely nothing to help or even worsen the problem (the problems they are responsible for in the first place), this little robot arm will pull away the blood - the blood that it had ‘spilled’ from its previous actions - to reveal a single white stripe of clean floor, only for that action to “spill the blood” further necessitating yet another mechanical (literally and figuratively) sweeping back of the blood. And occasionally it does a jaunty little wiggle, more of a friendly facade to have the viewing public see it as more human, sympathetic; another thinly veiled disguise of the literal machine of death that it is. But it, and the state as well, could easily solve all the problems and stop all the spilling blood if it were to allow the radical restructuring of the literal base of the world - e.g. a metaphorical/ literal hole for the blood to drain out of or the removal of the floor entirety. But what then would be the machines purpose? So it continues in its intentionally Sisyphean task; being, in the sage words of Homer Simpson, “..,the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”
The discussion of speech act theory was actually very helpful to me in my Shakespeare class. You have a talent for conveying information in an engaging, entertaining, and welcoming manner that is VERY admirable!!! :]
I had no idea about the actual content or nature of Stock's academic career so boy did I do a double take when she randomly came up in a non-TERF context lol
Cool video man and thanks for the shoutout! I don't really use UA-cam too much but a friend of mine forwarded me this and I was cracking up over your comments about my artistic look or whatever, hahaha some funny ass shit! I wanted to point out that I do appreciate you giving me credit for my interpretation on the piece as there were several large media sites that ripped my post word for word who conveniently erased my name from the bottom of the post which was rather frustrating to try and get corrected in the first few weeks. But yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed hearing your perspective being on the whole 'robot arm' phenomenon, some objections you had on my thoughts and also that you are open to multiple perspectives on art being 'ok' beyond what the original intention that the creator of the art had. I find it interesting how a lot of people online assume that I wrote this on purpose to go viral or that I even considered that it might be in the realm of possibility - which I most certainly didn't at the time of writing. I saw the piece and created my perspective based on some quick google searches combined with some personal assumptions (the fluid looked like red hydraulic fluid that I've seen before, for instance, and I'm not an robotics or electrical engineer so I had no idea what a 'kuka servo robot' was or that they ran on electricity). I just wanted to share some of my thoughts on this cool piece of art that I stumbled across with my friends and family who I thought might also find the concept interesting as it really struck home for me personally upon viewing it. Never in a million years did I think it would have reached like 500 million collective people online or whatever the number sits at now/ be spread around by being published on big media websites, or posted on multi-million follower facebook pages, tweet chains on large twitter accounts, or have videos like this one be created and posted on youtube channels with hundreds of thousands of followers, etc. like, it has absolutely been insane and none of this was ever a thought as 'possible' in the least bit. haha - but yeah, just wanted to reach out to let you know that I do appreciate a good critique and I think you did it well here! Cheers man -Kricked aka the morman bar mitzvah dj in a disney funkopop outfit that cleans your bongs lol
Hey dude, thanks for responding and taking the roasts and criticisms in stride. I’m sure it must have been frustrating having your post copied, especially since most of the people who stole it changed some key things making it a worse interpretation. Appreciate you giving your perspective here.
Not gonna lie, i actually really find this interpretation fascinating, i am glad it was written up online and hope the lashback wasnt too brutal to deal with.
i'll be honest, this video was the first time i saw your interpretation and i found it so compelling that i was actually disappointed to learn that the hydraulics fluid thing wasn't true, haha.
i preferred your interpretation way more than the originals. its much more relatable
I just wanted to say that I found your interpretation to be touching and meaningful, and I don't think it's less so for a couple of factual errors. I'm really glad you shared your thoughts and feelings on the piece, and I think there's something really compelling in how your post has almost become an alternative piece in its own right.
"Can't Help Myself" is a nice wordplay in English meaning both literally I cannot help myself but also have the connotation of I cannot control myself from not doing harmful behavior. I don't know if the original artists intended this, but this name sounds more sympathetic than anything else.
I *think* it was originally intended to comment on how nation-states cannot stop enforcing their borders as a function of being nation-states even as this is a futile and materially harmful act that drains resources that could instead help people.
@@Devilot109 original intent isn't the only thing that matters, these different interpretations (including the original one) are more interesting to talk about. The point of analysis isn't just finding out the true meaning
I didn't even think of it as someone not being able to help themselves. Only that they cannot stop from doing something.
@@yemmohater2796 I mean, I think trying to suss out artistic intent behind the title, which was not clearly explained in the way the piece’s artistic intent was, is also super interesting, and just as much an act of interpretation as any other method. For saying that there are multiple ways to do analysis, you seem oddly hostile to the one I chose.
@@yemmohater2796 okay but this was a discussion of the original intent and how it could have influenced the name, even if you consider other interpretations more valuable they're irrelevant to this particular discussion because the name comes from the creator and his intent.
Tbh, the red liquid immediately read as violent to me. I immediately saw it as a futile attempt to clean up/hide human violence behind technology
Beautiful in it's gruesomeness
thats so interesting because i always saw the work as slightly less harsh and more melancholy, like the red was not to symbolize violence, but injury
personally i didnt see it as violent tbh, but yeah i guess that goes to show how people can have very different interpretations
i agree with the other person in the replies, i saw it more as injury or hurt, but i also saw it as not necessarily being physical injury/hurt but just in general
Idk, I quickly antropomorpyse the robot, so I didn't see it like this. But also it is probably depends on your feel about technology. I live in Russia and people here mostly technology optimistic(me extrmly included).
Well yeah, it looks like a bloody massacre.
With the title “Can’t help myself” I think a anthropomorphic interpretation is totally valid… I thought it meant two things: I can’t stop trying to save myself and I literally can’t save myself despite my efforts. Really enjoyed your video!
Inevitable, really.
You should google that phrase too
Indeed. Imo Krick's interpretation was more on point than Xiaoyu Weng's. Although the chinese may be more inclined to comment on contemporary problems of surveillance, and the western view is more on the Self, unless we hear from the authors themselves, I think its fair to go with Krick's (escpecially as you said in view of the title)
Exactly what I was thinking
The title could as refer you the view not being able to look away again giving the sense of violence and futility of the whole cleanup act
I was made aware of this through Tumblr, and the thread there basically said that both the artist intent and popular interpretation are valid, because art is a dialogue in which both viewer and creator partake. I personally enjoy that communal approach.
i never even heard about the popular interpretation on tumblr, this whole video was a surprise to me
In most people's interaction with art, it's not really a dialogue in the sense that usually, the artist does not hear what one's personal interpretation of a work is.
I do agree that it is something in which both viewer and creator partake though. Partaking in art as a viewer is a skill, and it can be argued that the process of interpretation is where the art comes to life.
I enjoy sometimes taking that process of creative interpretation a step further, not just applying it to intentional works of art, but also to the unintentional things that surround us, reading messages where there might be none, and conjuring inspiration from idle thought. If it doesn't speak to you, just add layers of abstraction and/or irony until it does.
It's a nice exercise in taking a different perspective and enjoying the world that surrounds you. It also may help in processing stuff.
Seeing these interpretations as more than they are is a bad idea though. In that direction lies madness and/or paranoia. Temper your thoughts with truth and humility if you still choose to explore that direction.
i know it made its rounds on Tumblr recently like everywhere else, but i remember seeing it YEARS ago, before it died. it had a very similar interpretation (and maybe it was the original post that resurfaced with the updated news of its death and now resurgence) plus the original intent. it's very interesting to see that, in our capitalist society, so many people interpret it as working yourself to death, while the authors live in a communist society that's completely monitored and censored. it's crazy that two completely different meanings can be applied to one art piece with complete evidence
I am and will always be an avid supporter of "art is in the eyes of the beholder", this is why i have such a gripe with people who obsessed over whats canon whats not and dont let other people have their own headcanons or interpretations of things
Yeah I like that idea too
i think it's important to note that as the robot stops functioning the fluid has time to breech the perimeter set by the robot, and how people are more likely to sympathize with the robot in the situation rather than the fluid that's being kept at bay, never allowed to breech the perimeter.
I actually kinda love that interpretation
People more likely to sympathize with the soulless system that harms people, rather than the people themselves? (to keep on the interpretation or immigration and borders)
@@grnmjolnir so that's the thing, that's the discussion. can you see something from multiple perspectives without cancelling one out, etc
anthropomorphic objects are faaaar more relatable
@@vivanesca maybe to you. I definitely feel more attuned to a pile of red goo, ever oozing toward some semblance of freedom, but constantly wiped back into my suffering by forces far beyond my own ability to combat.
reminds me of yoko ono's "cut piece," an audience participation piece where one by one audience members would come up and cut away a piece of her dress. when showed this in class a lot of people (including me) interpreted it as a piece about female vulnerability and exploitation, but ono meant it to be a commentary on how as an artist she wanted to "give" to the audience (allowing them to literally take pieces of her) instead of "taking" (making art only for money, attention, etc). are either of these interpretations wrong or bad? i dont think so, and i think its a wonderful thing that art can have so many meanings, for both the artist and the viewer.
that sounds lovely. im glad to hear someone talking about yoko ono without complaining about how much they dislike her.
@@rainbowrotcod Nah. We should talk about hating her more. Her *and* John Lennon.
That sounds sweet. Yoko Ono's work is personally not my vibe, but it comes from a positive attitude that I can respect.
its also really interesting how the performance went really well and everybody stayed respectful in japan (i.e. it was recieved as it was meant) but totally derailed when she performed in the us so her performance in the us actually made it a commentary on partiarchy even if she didn't mean it at first
One of those interpretations reveals the soul of the artist; the other one reveals your indoctrination.
When I first came across the piece "can't help myself" it was with a different interpretation also formulated as if it was the authors intend. The interpretation was that the robot (or human) is desperately trying to keep all the liquid in the center but no matter how much the robot tries, no matter how hard he tries, the liquid glows out. Not only that but the room gets messier and messier the longer the piece is installed because of splatters and such. This was seen as a metaphor for perfectionism and trying to always have everything be perfect even if it's all getting messier and messier no matter what we do.
I personally find that reading quite amazing and it makes sense to me if only the fluid wasn't red. That I think doesn't fit in with the reading I presented just now and also doesn't fit the one that's so popular right now. Red fluid, at least in my mind, is always connected to blood which in turn makes me think of violence and harm. I haven't put in the thoughts jet to interpret the piece myself but I think the colour of the liquid can not be disregarded.
Good point about the colour of the liquid.
I wonder if there's an art criticism school of thought that says something like - any interpretation of an artist's work is correct as long as it accounts for and can reasonably answer questions about all aspects of the work, in the wider cultural context in which the art is placed.
So an artist can even be wrong about the meaning of their own work if they did a poor job of expressing their intention with their art, as their art takes the meaning that it actually expresses rather than what was intended.
Like, in this case, the robot apparently did cute dances for the audience? What's up with that?
Anyway, I think that's the school of thought that I would subscribe to.
This take is also correct. A lot of people also interpreted it this way.
Well the reading does not necessarily contradict the intantion proclaimed by the authors as in way the idea of hard enforced borders does stem from a compulsion to rigidly compartmentalise humans and the interaction between them and the long term effect of this can be described in good conscience as "messy"
Red liquid = blood = violence/harm is in itself a really interesting thought process.
For many people red liquid = blood = a cyclical inconvenience.
Not necessarily my view, but one way you could reconcile the red liquid with the notion of harm under the interpretation laid out here, is that perfectionism is a form of self harm? This could also coincide with how the robotic arm continually draws the red liquid towards itself.
Again, not my read of the overall exhibit, but its an interesting perspective to reconcile.
ngl I read it as a metaphor for life under captialism, forever repeating tasks that are essentially meaningless but are also necessary just to keep living? Especially with the task essentially being one so common to menial labor, cleaning up a mess. The robot arm plus the blood also gave the vibe of that clinical detachment from real violence that is so pervasive in captialism. We bleed, we watch each other bleed, we ignore those across the world who bleed, but we can't even help ourselves. not alone at least.
This was my interpretation too
Yea this looks nothing like Venezuela
I LOVE that interpretation
Commie spotted
You mean CORPORATISM. Capitalism is fantastic when regulated appropriately. A local business or an artist selling their work is capitalism as an example. Don't be a commie. It doesn't work.
I'm laughing because I actually did see this at the Venice bienniale (my universitys Art department sponsored a trip for some of us) and it was incredible, and I'm so happy the internet has blown it up, as mistaken as the interpretations are, because it is extremely rare for a piece of contemporary art to reach that many people who are not involved in an art context. We did short presentations in front of some of the installations, and I actually did mine on this work! Can't wait to see what you have to say about it.
Haha same, I was there in 2019 with my Uni Art department as well! This year I'm graduated, unemployed and in a pandemmy, but I bought the 2021 Biennialle tickets bc nothing is stopping me, it was such a great experience! And the way this video started is even more fuel to get there
Same!! Not from uni but because I'm literally venetian and I go to the Biennale every year. And I agree that it's great to see some of the pieces casually becoming popular and talked about even outside of sppecific spaces! I'm no art expert myself, but I love seeing different kinds of things and trying to interpret them.
@e- w- Wrong
@e- w- true but interpretations can be wrong as fuck. If you find meaning within your interpretation...sick, but there is an intent within creation..
@@nathanwaibel454 there is a difference between intent and interpretation. the artists intent versus our/the viewer/art consumer’s interpretation. that’s why it’s called interpretation lol
I saw a worker trying desperately to survive until it died. Pretty sure that’s totally what I’m personally bringing to it, but fuck it, I’m a struggling artist too, and I’ll read whatever I damn well please into it thank you very much.
I see a worker that was made to value a pointless goal, working itself to death over it, and failing, by the will of the person who imprisoned it there. As outside observers, we know that containing the fluid accomplishes nothing, we see no end in sight for this task, and we know that this entire scenario was designed by someone. And on a meta level, we know that a robot which didn't perform the task so faithfully and fruitlessly would indeed be reprogrammed or replaced. So though it might as well clean up the edges and call it a day, or even splash around and paint with the fluid, straying from its Sisyphean task would pose an existential risk to itself. The robot might not know this, but the viewer knows it almost implicitly.
I love when art's most powerful statement to the viewer is something the viewer wants to scream at the art before realizing they needed to scream it at themself as well. I want to tell the robot that its existence is one of meaningless, fleeting success, lasting failure, and compounding frustration. That humans built this cruel hell as a message to ourselves, and the message is that we belong in it, but that message is a lie.
Yeah that's exactly what I saw in it too
In effects, the border patrol agents / militarized police are themselves workers doomed to never finishing their jobs, though of course they are somewhat better paid than the people they 'enforce'
These guys will forever be forced to risk themselves to accomplish a goal set by their wealthy benefactors to never be complete, and yet most believe that goal as the prime purpose to their efforts and not whatever reality that supposedly lies beyond
@@simonholmes841 bro you could totally apply a sort of like Marxist Lacanian that sort of analysis to this interpretation like how the capitalist system gets workers to do meaningless tasks believing that it’s sole purpose in life but also like the philosophical and psychological implications of that which is expressed through the art
Same, I see a worker doing an ultimately arbitrary and pointless job while occasionally being able to enjoy a bit of life via ‚happy dances‘ (seriously, how do happy dances fit into the original intent of representing a state apparatus and surveillance technology?).
I had just expressed a few days ago about how I felt like I was losing more and more of myself. That life keeps taking pieces and there's no way to keep up. This robot, while definitely not what the author intended, it puts an abstract feeling I've been struggling with into such a concrete and powerful form.
not exactly the same, but if you liked this piece you might like untitled (portrait of ross in la) by felix gonxales-torrez! it has a similar concept of taking pieces of a person.
exactly
this is exactly how i feel about this piece
I saw it and interpreted it as a sort of desperation - trying to contain everything that's going wrong despite the fact that it just gets harder and harder, and the longer you do it the harder it is to feel like you've done everything properly. like being overwhelmed and struggling so much that it literally bleeds out of you, while other people watch on and you both hope that nobody sees it, and that someone does and comes to help. And the people walking by either don't care or can't help.
Or that it was about keeping your emotions or internal self bottled up - it's not going to work and you just have to keep on trying to sweep them out of sight.
I honestly didn't realise there was another interpretation, and i feel like i empathise too much with it to view the robot in a negative light. It's not harmful, it's in pain
Not sure it's a good sign that i want to hug this robot tbh
yeah, I like those interpretations, and if it is bad to want to hug the robot, I guess you can at least feel something in that I too would want to hug it
the first time i saw it, sans any of the context, just video of the robot and nothing else - i saw it as a representation of anxiety. your description is exactly spot-on. trying desperately to hold everything together and appear okay while inside you're completely overwhelmed and seconds away from breaking down into a panic.
It reminded me of a Damien Hirst but with a machine instead of flies
That was how I interpreted it too :)
I find the robot very uncomfortable to watch for too long, but I can't figure out why.
I don't know if it matters, but my mother worked as a cleaner/caretaker for years, and later doing whatever she could to supplement her meagre disability benefits. My brothers both have ADD, and I probably have it too, though undiagnosed. I think these facts contribute to my empathizing more with the robot. Probably too much - like I said, watching it for too long makes me uncomfortable in a way I find difficult to nail down.
I just want to find the off switch, clean up the mess and then turn it back on to see what it does when there's no red liquid. Why am I crying?
Sir i would like to say: i feel the most empathy for you. Which is like, the first time i’ve had empathy for someone on the internet i have had in a long time
Yup found my people
Oof, there it is.
In this case, the robot would spend all of its time dancing.
Right!?! Can you find my switch too?
I think the general idea behind that guy's interpretation is very much sound. However, my immediate criticism of it would be how he phrased it like it WAS the authorial intent. It doesn't read as "this is how I interpreted it and how it made me feel" but "I read this on the placard next to it". I think regardless of where you stand on art interpretation, it's pretty easy to see why imposing your own reading as the author's intent is maybe a bit disingenuous. Still, it's unlikely he was expecting such a big audience - virality's a bitch.
It was weird watching the start of this video having only seen the actual authorial description of the piece on a DIFFERENT viral spread of this installation, not remembering the details, and thinking "oh shit was that not true?" Then realising "okay this doesn't sound familiar, I'm pretty sure there was violence and blood splattering involved". I agree that the message intended isn't clear without context, although I do think it allows you to form an opinion similar to the "false" one and then wrestle with both interpretations in a way that actually works quite well. I think they marry together to make an interesting whole, and the futility and draining of life of the machine itself could easily be an unstated reading of the piece
totally agree - about the phrasing, i think that's a specific phenomenon of our time and the context. I feel like if an art critique writes a text on an artwork they don't have to constantly say "that's my opinion" because it should be implied but at the same time if something goes viral it seems much more likely for people to read clear authorical intent into an interpretation. don't wanna go all media literacy on this but there is some connection to how people unfamiliar with contemporary art can perceive it as obscure (which tbf is true sometimes) and are often asking get a straight answer as to what it is "about".
@@AlbertSirup I think the difference here is that the viral version stated factual errors about the actual construction/function of the robot. By stating that it was leaking the fluid, and that it needed to keep pulling that back in in order to keep functioning, it's really hard for any reader to discern that this is just an interpretation, and not the literal truth.
Like, if I saw a painting, where I had no idea about the details of the actual production/materials, but I decided to tell people the artist had gathered dirt from their yard to work into the paint, just because I thought it looked kind of gritty with natural earth tones, I feel like that would cross over from "my interpretation" to "just making stuff up". If you took me at my word, that would easily influence your interpretation of the painting.
Yeah, I mean I posted it on my personal fb account to friends and family and then on my personal instagram account immediately afterwards because I just wanted to see if my friends could relate or see what I was talking about in regards to the symbolism. I wasn't trying to write it in a way that seemed like it was coming from the original creator of the art, I was writing it as myself coming from me via my personal profiles. In retrospect, I can see how people made that assumption after it reached well beyond my little community of friends because people automatically assume that something that is going viral is going viral for a reason and that it MUST expand further beyond the writer behind it, because 'it wouldn't be going viral otherwise'. Giving anything and everything you see a sort of 'news story-telling' vibe about it...even though it can truly just be a few thoughts from a random dude on the internet that got randomly blown up. haha, anywho - cheers Arthur
Well said
@@coriander_sun hmm i get it, but in case of "can't help myself", from what i understand, it wouldn't be obvious where the liquid comes from just by looking at it, no? so even if it's technically wrong, i don't think it's in bad faith necessarily because it seems like a valid interpretation one could have seeing the work (i.e. they didn't necessarily lie about their aesthetic experience). but you're right in terms of such a statement changing the approach to interpretation by making the work seem more about the apparatus (the machine "really dies") and less about potential metaphorical meanings beyond that
Okay, first impressions on the piece: to me, it’s ‘about’ how things like Boston Dynamics’s robots are designed to sell you death and destruction while playing on your fascinations, and giving you something to blame that can’t fight back, or can’t be fought. ‘I can’t help myself from doing what I do, I was programmed to do this.’
It’s putting a spotlight on a state that would do this. Give a killing machine a happy little dance so people are distracted from what it’s cleaning.
I thought it was a bit blunt to be honest.
I think you managed to hit on the through line the artists were using, thinking others might find the same way there. I think that using an industrial construction robot to clean up while being fixed in place hits different for most people than the fully mobile BD machines do. Who was it who said "Context is everything"?
I think the "rooted industrial worker that dances on occasion" element of the robot comes in from a different direction than the "military contractor builds spookily naturalistic machines" element
@@weatheranddarkness I suppose! Thank you for your interpretation. I thought that the industrial robot was naturalistic, if not in the same vein as BD’S robots, but still human like. You can see that by the poster’s original response. That makes it more insidious to me.
I'm glad that my uncle from the 90s shows up every now and again to discuss art and politics. Very impressed at how well he's aging too! I hope I got some of those genes.
Honestly the gnome DJ's reading isn't a bad reading. The idea that people are treated like machines and worked to death, being forced to not enjoy the whimsy of life is a case for this art that can be well argued and I enjoy this take.
Will never forgive you for pushing me down the Robot Arm rabbit hole. But I am also SO EXCITED FOR THIS VID!
my apologies, Broey lol. Was not my intention
@@kricked why did u comment this? i mean like i could potentially see the comedic potential in this comment but it’s not funny so why? pls explain
@@heartycoffee4754 I think it's bc he's the author (harhar) of the fb and insta post that brought attention to the Robot Arm (mentioned in the video). that being said, since that isn't immediately clear the post does come off weirdly. lol almost like his post that sparked the initial controversy eh? 😂
@@cheshirecandy thx momecat i hope u find true love, wealth, and r free from disease. idk just trying to spread positivity over internet + maybe it will come true
@@kricked !!! hello
As an artist, you have to understand that your intentions behind your piece is only half the equation. I had several pieces in art school that were completely misinterpreted only to be told "that's too bad, bud" when i corrected people. All you should really care about it that the work impacted someone in some way, not what way it impacted them.
My reading of the piece is that it is a commentary on the monetization of one's suffering. The walls that hold the robot arm act as a stage, with viewers coming just to see the art piece which is containing its fluid which represents its blood/pain, instead of remedying its pain
interesting! thank u for sharing :))
Control the spill but do not fix the leak
I saw can’t help myself in a few different ways. My immediate reaction was “oh it’s about machines replacing the workforce, while perpetuating the capitalist system we live in, as it is brought in to also clean up after the destruction it caused,” before beginning to think about the fact that, no, the robot does not have a brain. It is not sentient. It did not cause the harm. Someone, a person, *used* the robot to cause harm. And they’re using it to clean up after both itself and themself. After that I started seeing it not in terms of the state and immigration, but in terms of the technocrats and subjugating the rest of the populace. Few people with the wealth and power enough to use the tool of a robot arm have decided not to use it for the betterment of society, but to harm society. All while putting on a nice, pretty little show for everyone onlooking. Look at it dance! Ignore what else it’s doing! *They* don’t want you to see that.
Then after you mentioned the fact of taking into account its expense and where it was displayed, I began to think of rich people viewing horrors in action behind nice protective glass in a nice, safe, and clean area. Also it made me think my original initial reaction of it relating to factory line worker obsolescence might be more in line with what a lot of in person viewers may have thought.
New stellar phrase added to my vocabulary “Wealth criminal” thank you for this buddy, thank you.
also sex pest!
I was literally going to post this myself.
@@madjangler 😂 beat ya to it 😘
@@Persephales Right!!!!!
i always thought i cant help myself was about self destruction, like addiction, self harm, etc. the title "i cant help myself" is such a perfect way to convey how it feels to be dealing with self destructive habits, you know its bad but at the same time you cant stop, you cant control yourself.
the life cycle of the robot also works well imo. the robot starts out happy and enjoying life, even enjoying cleaning up the blood. very similar to how at the start of ur path into self harm or addiction, its fun and you think you can stop whenever you wont so theres no worry, but as time goes on it stops being fun and starts being a burden. you end up spending most of ur time either doing or thinking about self harm or any other addiction much like how later in its life the robot now only has time to keep cleaning.
Really liked your interpretation, I used it in my presentation, thanks!!
@@zenitiv7 youre welcome! that actually makes me so happy to hear 😊
I think the post-writer's interpretation/emotional response is as valid as any, but I do take issue with how the post states a number of things as fact which simply aren't true (not hydraulic fluid, not required to keep machine running). The post also frames the poster's interpretation as if it is the artist's intended message, rather than the viewer's own interpretation. The interpretation is an interesting one and one that (aside from the just plain incorrect details) seems to fit the piece, but the way it is framed is at least somewhat deceptive (whether on purpose or not)
Yeah, if an interpretation needs to lie about details of a text, it‘s less valid than other ones.
@@paperbackwriter1111 if they fill in details they don’t know (because a robot arm can’t speak) then it’s not exactly lying
@@mtlewis973 the issue being discussed is not *that* he interpreted the piece of art, but how the interpretation was framed - i.e. portraying it as the artist's intention rather than his personal interpretation; as well as getting some factual details wrong.
@@lulu4882 i don’t buy that at all. subjectivity is implied. if you’re reading someone talking about art you’re reading their interpretation. ok it makes you look a bit 2010s tumblr but there are worse things
@@mtlewis973 i'm not selling anything lol.
"subjectivity is implied." i don't think this is necessarily true. everyone's interpretation *is* subjective, but people very often explicitly portray their interpretation as the "intended" or "correct" one, and that tone does serve to diminish/dissuade discussion of other interpretations. the way he fabricated facts based on quick assumptions (like claiming the liquid is hydraulic fluid the robot needs to keep operating) leads the reader to believe that his is the "intended" interpretation, which is what i take issue with.
it's not the biggest deal in the world and obviously he didn't anticipate it to go viral, but people should be careful to get their facts straight if they're going to post shit publicly on the internet in general. this is a relatively harmless instance of spreading misinformation but it did serve to flatten discussion about this complex piece of art and obfuscate its political edge.
I think another interesting aspect about considering authorial intent is that it's the galleries, museums, art curators that actually decide what information about an artist to show, where to show, how to show it, etc. So even the basis for authorial intent deals with a entity that isn't the viewer or artist
Yeah, imho this is a big part of how the figure of the "auteur" in authorial intent and auteur theory is constructed under capitalism - galleries, museums, etc. are incentivized to create a public image of a given artist's persona (or brand) that can be "sold" to the public to increase demand for the works credited to that artist as commodities, and commodities related to those works (museum trips, tours of the artist's house, merchandise and reproductions of the works, etc).
So often art is up to the interpretation of the time, and it makes perfect sense that this piece got around during the pandemic. We are all worked to our limits, told to bleed and die for our corporate overlords just to keep a roof over our heads. Like, I think that the initial artist's intent also makes sense, but I think it makes more sense when it originally came out, whether or not the time was explicitly intended to be a part of the piece. The time aspect of it depicts a certain desperation that is uniquely human/animalistic. The more literal "blood is used to keep the corporate machine flowing" works, but so does the interpretation that we are told to hold ourselves together without even a bucket to keep our guts in.
I dig this and agree!
Not just the time it was made, but also the cultural context of the viewers. It might be more obvious to a person living in a place like China that this is a piece about surveillance states and the violence of borders, but a middle class white person living in America probably isn’t thinking about those things as much and would be less likely to consider those things when coming to conclusions about the meaning of this piece.
Was thinking this, you put it into good words
I first saw the piece on tumblr, with a similar chain of anthropomorphizing interpretations, though slightly different, and lacking the misinformation about the red fluid being lubricant.
I did personally see the piece as more of a representation of self destructive behaviors, or of the idea of working one's self to death, on a task that is ultimately pointless and trying harder actually makes the task more difficult, the red fluid becomes more and more splattered beyond the reach of the robot as it tries to keep it contained. In a way the red fluid could also be read as being traits of ourselves that we don't like, the more we try to hide them, and make ourselves "pleasing" the more they just leak out and make a mess that's beyond our ability to fix. I think the fact that its called "cant help myself" and got renamed to "couldn't help myself" after it broke down does a lot in swaying people towards these sort of interpretations. There some powerful word-play going on with both.
Since I also knew the piece was intended to be someone political I did also a read a kind of statement of the futility of capitalism into all this. We are forced to work pointless tasks, in a way that just makes things worse, we cant help ourselves, and one day we just shut down and die. I guess its a bit "obvious" to interpret a piece featuring a machine doing a task to be about how capitalism makes us feel, but actually watching this robot try it best, do little dances, hear the screaming of the machinery, and still it "couldn't help itself" is just really sad.
I got to see the robot arm artpeice in person at the gugenheim a while back, it was quite moving and unsettling. excited for the video
can you still see the art even if it stopped working?
All things aside, that art piece is super cool. I can’t even imagine how much work went into the building and programming that machine.
-The Death of the Author- ... The Life of the Story.
My personal reading of the piece, before I knew about the authorial intent, was about individual vulnerability, dehumanization, and the societal pressure to always be 'okay'. The robot is constantly bleeding, which reads that they've been hurt, but they are programmed to clean it up themselves and perform little dances for the audience. The title feels, if anything, apologetic: Sorry, Just Can't Help Myself! Like someone compulsively apologizing for their own pain, and the difficulty and vulnerability it must be causing on everyone else, it tries to hide the evidence of its wounds as best it can, and distracts people from how much it needs help by performative happiness. (Which is a common habit in those of us who have experienced abuse...)
Just as our pain and vulnerability is a messy and often gruesome experience, the robot's blood is never completely cleaned up; they'll never stop bleeding unless someone else helps them, but the audience views them as nonhuman and has no sense of responsibility or compassion towards its pain. The expectation is that it will solve its own problems, but the flow is too strong for it to ever get under control. Eventually it is exhausted by this dance and stops performing happiness/doing dances, having lost the energy to do even the bare minimum to still look okay. In the end, having never been helped, it dies on stage.
My reading is pretty strongly informed by my experiences of abuse, untreated PTSD, and suicidal ideation (among myself and my peers) so it's definitely me bringing additional context to the table! I wouldn't expect everyone to have the same response, but it isn't too dissimilar from the viral post's reading. It also fits in well with other people's readings of working class exploitation- I especially liked the 'blood for the machine' reading.
While I understand what the authors were going for, I agree that trying to make anarchist commentary by...spending a huge budget on a robot arm, anthropomorphizing the arm's movements, and then showing it off at prestigious European art institutions...sort of defeats the message? Plus Western culture (such as it is) skews towards individualism, so it should be expected a Western audience in a Western art institution is going to default to an individualist reading, especially when you make the robot move like an individual and give the piece a title that assigns it an ego. I don't think it's a coincidence that the art went viral with that kind of reading. While they may have meant to talk about border violence (which I do think is an essential thing to talk about), they went about it in such a way that, all and all, doesn't seem to have been particularly successful.
But hey, they made a deeply compelling piece about mental health and the dehumanization of the working class, soooo mission failed successfully?
5:03 honestly the musicians take on it sounded like how living under capitalism feels. Fuck how MY life feels. Constantly going, breaking more and more both physically and mentally, never having time to oneself, and yet having no choice but to continue.
As a writer and a trans person, I think it's interesting that the shift away from schools of criticism focused on authorial intent just so happened to coincide with the period of time when access to authorial platforms began to diversify. A part of me wonders whether this change might have something to do with academia's (and the privileged class as a whole's) reticence to treat marginalized members of society as "authorities" on anything, least of all the art that they produce.
Yes, although it could also be that the construct of the "auteur" figure in auteur theory implies hierarchies formed by factors like perceived talent/perceived and presumed competency, personality/charisma and "relatability," and other stuff that culture teaches us to associate primarily with white, cishet, abled, (mostly) Christian-background men. We're more likely to see members of this group as auteurs, and the figures we raise to auteur status who are from this group help to reinforce the idea that these people are the auteurs.
When the idea that these people are more talented than everyone else starts to be more widely-challenged, I think it can challenge the validity of auteurs as an idea, overall.
Urghh I love both these takes!!!
Tbh I love the impact this “death of the author” concept has brought, which in my opinion boils down to people enjoying art unconstrained by the confines of an artist’s original meaning, which, when done right, can elevate our experience of the artwork so much more.
But I also understand the frustration with the increasing lack of recognition for and appreciation of artists and the intent/care they imbued their work with, especially given how anti-intellectualism and a sort of “why do you care? it’s not that deep” sentiment seems to reign over us in an age where we have an unprecedented access to art created by people of so many backgrounds and places, not simply the hierarchical, exclusionary position that informs our traditional view of the Author.
Coming at this from an MFA back ground who's sat in on several studio critiques, I think both the audience impression and the author's intention are valid and important. What was the overlap and difference between the viewer's impression and the artist intension was the crux of almost every conversation.
This is the sort of thing I find fascinating too. While my own views tend to "value" the artist's intention more than the interpretation as "the truth" I think the way that the work is interpreted is its own layer of truth, especially since the artist did not declare "THIS IS WHAT I MEAN" before the people were allowed to view the piece.
'Gnome who sneaks into your house to clean your bong while you're asleep' and 'Funko pop of a disney adult' fucking killed me already god damn that's some accurate shit
i actually don't think the author's intended message falls short at all with the robot's 'human' actions. humanity makes machines out of ourselves designed towards obscene violence and still manages to make those institutions pantomime humanity-they have cheery ads, social media, etc, where they might tell jokes, do a dance, etc, and the people involved all are humans with human friends and family, so therefore their work may seem human to those people who see them in human contexts. and all the while, the institution they maintain is responsible for an unending spill of violence that they try to sweep (like the machine!) under the rug. we, the audience, might be inclined to miss the blood for the cheery pantomime of humanity and human emotion. we forget the huge, hulking machine for its happy dancing, we miss the blood for pitying the hard work and stress the robot endures. we might miss the blood of others in perceiving the blood (sweat, and tears) of the robot. none of this is at odds with that mormon dj at a bar mitzvah's interpretation.
i really like this interpretation! it also makes sense given the medium of a robot. i think it makes the audience (or at least me) able to detach from the empathy i feel towards it if i'm reminded that that its still a hunk of metal at the end of the day, just like how we're able to stop empathizing with institutions of violence if we're reminded that they're just institutions.
As a literary scholar, I think you did an excellent job explaining the basic theories. It sounded a lot like my first day in masters classes. You can tell you did a lot of research..
Hooray for John the Duncan. Excited to hear his voice in a video essay about robot sad.
This was my favorite video of yours. I laughed out loud twice and learned a lot for someone with a bachelor's of English.
I also see the piece in an anarchist light. The Futility of Work. No matter how much you do, you're never done until you're too broken to continue.
The Robot keeping the blood in it's boundaries, is in part a survival mechanism when understood as the state surveilance and borders mechanism, since.. if borders aren't keeping anyone in, they aren't really there, so the state dies. a state bleeding out is absolutely a powerful image in this context, and it's kind of cool that the post pointed this out. It seems however anti intellectual to make up this whole functionality about lubricant, happy dances and the degradation of the piece as part of it, specifically to muddy the meaning and make it more banal? I don't know the answer here, i'm just a frustrated student of art history conflicted about the implications of art going viral in the mainstream while being sort of misrepresented to achieve that? :(
It's not really true though. States predate any kind of enforced borders. For most of human history, enforcing border controls has been too difficult to really be possible
@@krombopulos_michael also apart from communists places like east germany cuba north korea ect borders are about kepping people out not in.
When you're watching a video essay and someone shouts out your uni.
Much love from University of Sussex. And I can attest: The protests were completly non violent and the """worst""" thing I saw was CHALK grafitti around the library square ground on an open day, telling people not to come to the uni because it supported TERFS lol.
this man made a 40 minute video about something, talking non-stop and i listened to every second even though i understood very little
i’ve heard some interesting things about this piece. if i remember correctly, it used to wave and dance to people while scraping up just a little bit of fluid but over time as the amount of fluid increased it slowly started to have less time to be all happy dancing and stuff. after a while it’s just scraping the fluid just barely managing to keep up until it dies. i heard a theory that it was about how people slowly start to deteriorate because they find they have less time to do what they enjoy and instead only focus on working to just “scrape” by. i found out that the fluid wasn’t even essential to keep it living; we’re so enveloped in work that we forget to enjoy what we’re working for in the first place.
10:27 there it is!!! he said the thing!!!!
Thank you for this. I missed it the first time.
tag urself I'm contrarian cumback
Is it a thing? Does he say it at some point in every video, or..?
@@tokevarvaspolvi8999 every leftist youtube essay is required to have the words or some variation of "well come back to this later"
I've fallen in love with this version of Our Retired Explorer and once the musicians you commissioned posts it I'd love to get a link to it or a place I can buy it. It's just beautiful
Thanks! I’ll upload it to my Spotify and Bandcamp some time this week 👍
I only know this from a viral Tumblr post that was just a copy paste of the actual art description and hearing the other side of the internet's interpretation of it is wild
This art piece reminds me of the short story “There will come a soft rain”,
I read it and the poem it was inspired by, because of this comment. Thank you
"[Twitter is] the part of the internet where people are the meanest about things that matter the least…"
Shhhh, no one tell Sam about Reddit
I am only in media fandom reddits ,
Twitter is infinitely worse than reddit.
Reddit is at least nicely compartmentalized and if you just want to scroll through pictures of cats with their arms hanging down all you have to do is go to r/danglers or something
Eh I'd say Twitter's worse.
Reddit they might call you a stupid cuck incel for disagreeing about Zack Snyder's Superman.
But at least not a large percentage of them aren't trying to ruin people's lives over the most petty shit.
Honestly the worst part about Reddit is the hive mind that often causes misinformation
First thought was "Automation killing the workers now, eh?"
Then i thought how in a future space station there will be a sweeping robot doing this as it doesn't realize its on a doomed vessel. Its human enticing dances being played to empty halls
The Group of Seven paintings being empty to show Canada as empty before colonization rings true to me. Here in the US we had the Hudson River School, which basically did the same thing. Very popular and dramatic beautiful landscapes that are almost completely devoid people. Romanticizing the land without acknowledging the native people who live there
Like that TikTok about Land O'Lakes butter changing it's packaging.
"They got rid of the woman but kept the land."
love this vid so much, ur a gem on this site
When I first saw images/video of Can't Help Myself, I thought of "Bullshit Jobs" and minimum wage, the robot cleaning up the fluid for really no purpose other than its what its commanded to do, steadily growing more tired and less efficient until it dies/is decommissioned. The artists intent is really interesting, and I'm looking forward to reading more about them, but from my experience working various bullshit jobs, it just immediately resonated with me in that way. Even the voyeurism of the onlookers/audience reflects in how I felt being viewed as a machine by both customers and management.
Absolutely fantastic vid as always, I've pinned some of the texts mentioned for further reading because this was super sick all around.
I'm so tantalised by your final brief comments about prestigious art exhibition spaces and what vested interests they might have in the works they choose to exhibit or commission. I'd love to see you do a video about that and how it effects public understanding of art and art criticism, if you felt you had further points to make. Really enjoyed this one, as usual!
That overenthusiastic english teacher bit was the funniest thing I've seen in a while. We are in hell but at least we're not alone
Almost anytime I hear Jacques Derrida's name, "Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)" by The Weakerthans gets stuck in my head. So I found it immensely satisfying that this video's end credits featured a really cool Will Jarvis cover of that song. I don't hear a lot of Weakerthans covers in general.
“So now we can see now how the Bean Dad thread perfectly matches the structure of the Odyssey.” Is that… a Ulysses joke? 👀
Lola, hello! I'm a subscriber. I've seen your recent yt community posts. Hope your doing well mentally. Can't wait for your next video essay! :)
Huh, I saw this in person. I'm not much of an art person, but me and my family visited the Guggenheim since we were visiting New York and it was a Thing To See. I remember we walked into the room and I got a creeped out feeling when I saw it, and then we looked at each other and laughed it off. It was pretty neat to watch.
Unlike these other uncouth viewers, I'm only commenting after watching the entire video.
I especially enjoyed the part where you looked at that one thing and meaningfully related it to that other more abstract thing and then really really talked about society.
I'm just commenting for engagement :)
My immediate thought when I saw the piece was that it represented the struggle or even impossibility of one person to mitigate the harm that is being done around the world. I saw the the robot as a politically active individual and the blood-like substance as all of the injustice in the world at once. So while the morals of the robot arm drove it to attempt to "clean up" it was never possible to clear the mess. Hence the title "Can't Help Myself"
In a critical thinking class in high school I wrote a paper where I talked about deconstructionism, and how the meaning and authority of Derrida's own writing had to be deconstructed as well, and then the thing I was writing had to be deconstructed as I was writing it, and it was sort of an ouroboros, a paper eating itself in a tongue in cheek way. My teacher basically said they couldn't tell if it was dumb or brilliant, which I took as a compliment.
i view cant help myself as a symbol of addiction and codependency with those around the addict. the viewer becomes the bystander of the robot arm's addiction to it's work, thinking that it is caring for itself, but really just wasting it's time and energy! hehe
i think the issue is that he stated it as fact. all he needed to say is that it was his interpretation
I suppose my interpretation of it is largely influenced by its title, Can't Help Myself. I thought it was supposed to represent a serial killer feeling shame as they mechanically go about cleaning up another crime scene they created. They hate having to go through this endless clean up process, but like the title says...."I can't help myself". So on and on it goes.
huh, that is an interesting interpretation that i would not have considered!
i thought of can't help myself being about trauma. like, a constant deluge of memories that becomes so overwhelming that sometimes you can't even move. you keep things together, but no matter how much coping mechanisms you have, how much support, how much therapy, how much meds, it's always going to be there. and you can never clean up that blood.
Should I be ashamed that I understood ALL of those "terminally online" references?
Not if we truly believe that real life is online. I certainly do, it's the world we live in!
Look, the video essay was excellent, accessible, etc. But my real takeaway continues to be my introduction to Will Jarvis via that damn ending song at 34:05 that I've listened to nine times and counting.
Haven't seen the video yet, but let me just say that death of the author is my absolute favorite talking point ever. I'm gonna love this.
Completely unrelated, but is your profile pic a pride flag, or something else? It's really pretty and if it's for an ace identity I've never heard of, I'd love to know which one (I'm a question ing young ace myself)
@@bird2793 Well hi there! Yeah, that flag's specifically for aroace. Mind you, I like the standard ace flag, but I think this one looks like a sunset, which is perfect because every aroace I've ever met likes sunsets better than dating.
I wish you the best of luck figuring yourself out! It took me years to figure out what was going on with me, but I didn't have the resources that are available now. I do hope your time is smooth sailing! Remember, there's no harm in taking your time to figure these things out.
@@aceofspades3533 Thank you so much!!! This flag also reminds me of the People's Flag of Milwaukee, which is supposed to represent the sun rising over Lake Michigan (Which I've come to love it even more since starting at UWM and seeing the horrible current flag in front of the library everyday.) Thanks for the advice, too...I'm on the spectrum, so I probably just value different things than other people in relationships, etc. I think the song "Marry Me, A Little" from Company sums up my attitudes pretty well. Thank you, again, and I hope you have a good weekend.
as someone who's physically disabled with a degenerative condition, it makes me think a lot about the futility of physical therapy for me. i'm trying so hard to keep my body working well, to the point that i'm exhausting myself and almost making things worse in the process. but i can't help myself, i don't want to decay while i'm still in here. things just get more and more unmanageable as i get more and more exhausted, but the harder it gets to contain the liquid/keep myself running well enough to get through my day-to-day, the harder i have to work in order to stay at a consistent level of ability, thus exhausting myself more and the cycle goes on and on
I feel like author's intention should still factor in somewhat. Without the creator, we wouldn't have the art in the first place so I think it does matter we get an idea of what he's thinking.
The thing is that, if this was the case, what's the point of making art? Art is about expression and interpretation. Is it good to know the author's intent? Absolutely. However, the truly important part is the interpretation of the art. There is art everywhere that is interpreted differently from the authors' intention.
@@whodis2614 But it is only an opinion that art is about interpretation, and it can be argued the more weigh you give you interpretation the more you take away from expression; which some would argue is the primary purpose of the art.
I certainly as a writer who puts a lot of thought into my metanarratives would find it sad if no reader was even a little bit curious as to what I was trying to say. That being said, the reader drawing their own conclusions based on what they themselves bring to the table is not only desirable but absolutely inevitable.
Then we can‘t parse the meaning of any text where we don‘t know anything of the author.
Obviously there‘s different texts where different lenses are interesting.
Intent can be valuable to analyze.
But sometimes it can be totally disregarded and it‘s great.
I don't think it should be necessary. An artist's intent could also be to hide their intent. That's what I did in my poetry classes. Wrote down a "story", buried in symbolism, and cut like 80% of it. The best feedback I got was basically: "I have no idea what this is about, but I enjoyed it." It's a very zen approach to creating art. So if Stock argues that the art is a set of instructions to find authorial intent, I might say "Why can't it be a set of instructions for finding something else, and why should I need to know what that is?" Indeed, if the reader finds something they value, does it ultimately matter if I didn't put it there?
That is also how I enjoy art. I like abstract paintings, poetry, music, and so on. I often enjoy music more when I'm just listening to the melody and sounds, including vocals, but when I find out the lyrics, the music usually loses something, because the meaning they convey clashes with my experience. I can also enjoy art that states its intent in various degrees of clarity, but that type of art caters to a very different need.
"They're basically the Wu-Tang Clan of Canadian landscape painters" I now know what I want to be when I grow up
My introduction to this piece was through the clickbait-y description, which I found very resonant when viewed through the lense(s) of a person with chronic illness, physical disability, neurodiversity, and trauma. The "dancing" being a pretty clear metaphor for the "masking" that society insists on to hide pain, anxiety, or just being different. And the gradual breakdown of the robotic arm as it lost it's hydraulic fluid being the fight against entropy in a universe that cares nothing for you and will keep on after you aren't able to hold all of your cells together any longer.
But state violence, surveillance, and oppression also work as a reading too. 🤷
I saw this piece as being stuck in a day to day grind where the work never ends and nothing new happens. I also find it really frustrating because it cleans so slowly and ineffectively and it makes me wanna get in there and help the poor thing
Thanks for the video, Sam. It's always a highlight.
What a great essay. You never cease to impress me with how effectively you can synthesize complex concepts like post-structuralism or conflict theory, and even more impressively, how you can talk in an engaging and even funny manner about distressing subjects like colonialism or reality shows.
This was super interesting! There are too many videos that shun the death of the author so I felt like I was doing something wrong by still liking works by authors who are known jerks etc.
I am trying to get published myself (in Japan with a major publishing company, its very difficult but I'm getting there...) so when I write something its been drilled in my heas by teachers, editors, and fellow artists that it is your work until its published, then its open to as many interpretations as possible which is why you should try to make your intent as clear as possible.
However I have also learned that humans cannot mind read. And its a lie that we tell ourselves that we could even know exactly the author's intent. But I do think its polite to figure out where the author was coming from when they created their piece. You'll never know exactly what the intent was.
On top of that, art is a form of communication. Communication is a skill. So even communicating your idea so its understood is a challenge and you might accidentally be saying stuff you didn't realize you were saying. Like Bridgerton feels like it was trying to be inclusive, perhaps the intent was inclusivity, but the way it was actually presented did not execute that intent very well at all.
But art and human communication are not that easy.
Anyway I like using art as a tool of inspiration. I check whatever the author said about the work (which can also be interpreted, again, there's no way for me to truly know their actual intent just what I perceive their intent to be) then I make conclusions based on the imagery given to me and my initial reaction to it. Then I've decided what the work means to me and I enjoy it. Its a personal experience.
Because of that the Scarlet Letter read as like a fantastical Disney movie, Dracula and the Count of Monte Cristo give me the same fancy old opulence vibe, and Berserk is a shoujo manga. None of these are acceptable from most point of views but I have evidence for my readings of them just like anyone else.
Art is multifaceted. Humans are multifaceted.
Sorry for the super long comment. I dunno how to express my idea concisely.
“ the place on the internet that’s the meanest about things that matter the least.” That’s dead on.
I love being able to recognize the voices of my other favorite creators. I'm only a few minutes in but I'm already like, "Awww, who is this soft spoken young man? Is that Noah Samsen?"
Yeah, I was actually thinking something as dorky as "ooh ooh ooh, it's Noah Samsen"!
This video has been sitting in my Watch Later for months, glad I finally sat down with it. Really fascinating discussion! Thank you!
My personal take on all of this is that it actually depends on the piece, like, some pieces of art are designed to make it impossible to have a diferent interpretation than the artist like most mainsetream movies, where as others, like the eric andre show, dont even have a meaning at all by the creator of the piece, i think we should see each piece with all context of it and then decide how we should critisise it or interpret it, but thats just my opinion and take, i just think each person should defenetly be free to consume art however they want and interpret it the same way, as long as they arent hurting anyone
I stopped to search "bean dad", and I come back to the video, now, in I think a -sadder- better frame of mind to appreciate said video.
Ah when you said kathleen stock I litreally shivered, not a single mainstream media interviewed any of us the protested or gave an actual attempt to understand the reasons we were protesting. And the email the univerisity sent after she finally quit was disgusting, expressing there saddness at the 'loss' of her, disapointment at the students and facility that joined the protest, and finally congratulating her extensive 'gender critcal' writing. They did not once mention the transphobe or trans students safety during this entire time.
The red liquid is 110% hydrologic fluid.
As a jet mechanic I can smell that fluid just by sight alone
I feel like the dishes bit was just a gag; but imagining the world where you're co-authoring a script with your roommate and they bug you about the dishes in it actually seems to me like it would rank lower than putting up signs in the ranking of passive aggressive dish related discourse. Because signs are a level of lack of trust I refuse to participate in at my home.
The closing music is beautiful.
Haha, the whole Kathleen Stock part is perfect, having seen the protest in person I can confirm that your evaluation that she was making a mountain out of a molehill is 100% accurate. Reports really made it seem a rampage
it feels notable to me that the "state mechanism enforcing borders" and "anthropomorphized machine burning itself out because its purpose is an impossible task" aren't contradictory readings. in fact, when we combine them, there's plenty of room to inspect why it's easier to relate to the machine that (at first, but then slowly less so) imitates a human than to the fluid that has no ability past trying to leave, and how that relates to our willingness to personify governments while dehumanizing "floods" of refugees. i'm far from committed to this read as definitive or sole, but i appreciate parr's addition to the piece with this reaction
Really liked your interpretation
Is there a school of thought that recognizes that each mind's relationship to signifiers is unique and that information cannot be translated between two minds without some level of loss? People who believe that authorial intent is paramount don't seem to understand that authorial intent is written in a language that no one but that author spoke at that point in time.
Authorial intent also interact weirdly with translation now that you're talking about it.
what you're saying reminds me of information theory- at least, my professor brought it up in this general context. on wikipedia, it looks like it refers more to comp sci stuff, but I can definitely see it applying more broadly to other things. Interestingly, the point my professor was making was that Information Theory is so engrained in our culture that it's kind of hard to even notice (and that we should be skeptical of it). is it accurate that the author first has an original idea, then attempts to "beam it" to the audience (with minimal noise), or is the idea/work developed/grown in collaboration with the materials and tools? confusing stuff, not sure what I believe-- just thought it might be of interest!
This is somewhat a part of reader response, and is common now in media studies and even fandom studies departments. It argues that the reader is the home of meaning, so it follows that each reading/meaning created is contingent on the individual and their context
I interpreted it as someone trying to solve a massive problem they have on their own either refusing help or just not getting any until they eventually break
THANK YOU for the huge dork payoff of having a cover of "Our Retired Explorer" as the end credits! My John K. Samson-infused brain immediately went there when you mentioned Derrida- also, a very cool analysis of... Analysis and interpretation in the expensive and fascinating world of modern installation art- do a whole video on this particular kind of wealth criminal!
Two thoughts come to mind, the first is my reading of it as a worker struggling to survive and then finally breaking down and dying. The other thought has to do with how much this conversation about art criticism reminds me of conversations about what art is as a whole. I'm sure there's many people that would see this beautiful piece of art and claim it's not art because it's not a painting
I’m not a visual artist, but I do compose music mostly for ensembles including voice. There’s definitely intention behind my works and the texts that inform/accompany them, especially in one I’m writing right now because it’s very explicitly political. In general though, I don’t have much of an issue with interpretations that might differ from what the artist had intended. However, I also think that acknowledging the creator’s intended message when discussing personal interpretations is a good thing to do because of the work and dedication it takes to produce a work. To me, neither the artist nor the consumer can have complete and total control over the meaning of a work (nor should they, really) because communication in any medium, creative or not, necessarily involves two people with different experiences which will inform how they view a piece of art.
I think the problem most people had with the copypasta was that it was not presented as "an interpretation", but as "the intended interpretation" which is not the same thing
Taking somewhat of the creators intentions into consideration while still going with the ‘endless toil’ vibe to the piece, this is my own interpretation;
I see the robot arms constant raking of the blood like fluid as the violence of the state seeking to solve problems but naturally only adding to and even perpetuating those existing problems. Much like the military and/ or the police taking actions to “sweep up” after damage they did comes to light (like police using body cams or the US military “helping to rebuild” places like Iraq) only to have these bits of theater do absolutely nothing to help or even worsen the problem (the problems they are responsible for in the first place), this little robot arm will pull away the blood - the blood that it had ‘spilled’ from its previous actions - to reveal a single white stripe of clean floor, only for that action to “spill the blood” further necessitating yet another mechanical (literally and figuratively) sweeping back of the blood.
And occasionally it does a jaunty little wiggle, more of a friendly facade to have the viewing public see it as more human, sympathetic; another thinly veiled disguise of the literal machine of death that it is.
But it, and the state as well, could easily solve all the problems and stop all the spilling blood if it were to allow the radical restructuring of the literal base of the world - e.g. a metaphorical/ literal hole for the blood to drain out of or the removal of the floor entirety. But what then would be the machines purpose? So it continues in its intentionally Sisyphean task; being, in the sage words of Homer Simpson, “..,the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”
I think this is a very interesting interpretation! Thank you for sharing it
the music on your videos is something special. will jarvis rules
"they're basically the wu-tang clan of canadian landscape painters" im fuckin crying LMAOOOO
thank you for clarifying the difference between separation of art from the artist and death of the author, it gets confused a lot online
6:05 Goddamn what is this song????? I need to know!!
The discussion of speech act theory was actually very helpful to me in my Shakespeare class. You have a talent for conveying information in an engaging, entertaining, and welcoming manner that is VERY admirable!!! :]
I had no idea about the actual content or nature of Stock's academic career so boy did I do a double take when she randomly came up in a non-TERF context lol