Here's a new version of a piece I've been making since 1991, when I was a wee artist in my late twenties. It's called "The Carbon Atom", although it has a longer title which I'll explain below.
As I often do, I based this piece on a "found image" from an old printed source, in this case a book about space exploration from the 1960's. Years later I found out that the image was a repurposed publicity still from a 1950's sci-fi movie called "The Man From Planet X". In the reprinted version I used, the caption reads:
The carbon atom is basis for
life as we know it
and probably for whatever life
may exist elsewhere, but
local conditions may make strange forms.
I liked a lot of things about this combination of text and image. Besides the oddly charming way the caption is formatted like poetry, there was also the obvious irony that the "strange form" this alien life took was basically just a human dude with a long nose and big eyes. Moreover, it was a lowbrow sci-fi "space invaders" trope, even though the book itself purported to be "scientific" (the article being illustrated was by the then famous German-American science writer Willy Ley).
I made a great big acrylic painting of it on canvas, which I showed in a few galleries and then rolled up in my basement. A few years later I was in a retro store in Los Angeles and came across a set of small plastic toys, one of which strongly reminded me of the "Carbon Atom/Man From Planet X" alien (it must've been based on it).
By then, I was making work by photographing toys and other props and digitally collaging them together with human models, so I thought this would make a perfect update, and I restaged the piece (using my own eyes and mouth for a smidgen of self-portraiture).
I liked this version better, because the "robot-like" spaceman seemed to be both organic (ie, carbon based) and mechanical -- a "transhuman" being. I also liked the way his weapon was painted red -- as though it wasn't phallic enough already! -- and he had a concave target thingy on his stomach, making the whole thing into a sexualized game of sci-fi paintball.
As was usually the case with my digital work, I still wished it had a "painterly" quality -- the icing on the Conceptual cake for someone trying to turn "low" culture into "high" -- so I bided my time until computers could accomplish that properly. They can do it now, although ironically it's because they're becoming a new type of "life" -- alien, threatening, and not based on carbon.
