The Seventeenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico argued that history unfolded in cycles, with every period of decay being succeeded by one of growth. According to his view such transitions were guided by the hand of God. Fast forward 300 and counting years and, despite the latter statement sounding rather outdated, this conversation still sparks when contemplating the works of Jon Rafman.
Although the Canadian-born artist, videographer and essayist is an illustrious face of what, since 2009, has been labelled as Post-Internet art, his works retain a powerful Medieval aura. The same shared by the bestiaries of the Middle Ages, by the haunting dreamlike visions of Hieronymus Bosch, of Dante’s Divine Comedy or Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus. But also the street scenes of Flemish paintings, punctuated by a cornucopia of characters sampled from real life and rearranged with moral meanings. As a matter of fact, Rafman recently hosted a performance in which organist Hampus Lindwall live soundtracked one of his films in the evocative setting of the 11th century Swiss Church of Rougemont, as part of Gstaad’s Elevation 1049.
Rafman’s long-lasting fascination with such iconography actually stems from the present and from his consideration that we’re living through Medieval times. As a society — according to the artist — we are helplessly heading back to a neo-feudal culture in which ‘It feels at times as if the social contract is about to rip apart.To quote Brecht: “Indeed I live in the dark ages! A guileless word is an absurdity”’.
His oeuvre does no doubt retain an anguishing and disturbing visual element shared by much Medieval art, in which life blended with the realm of fantasy, religion and oral tales. The internet is indeed the closest expression now existing to that approach to world-building and vernacular storytelling, of which one of the greatest examples is Rafman’s Dream Journal, 2016-2019.
The occasion to meet the artist comes on the occasion of his exhibition 𝐸𝒷𝓇𝒶𝒽 𝒦’𝒹𝒶𝒷𝓇𝒾 — which reads ‘abracadabra’ — at London Sprüth Magers.
He is wearing a suit, which may look unexpectedly refined for someone otherwise associated with an iconography made of internet-era American kid bedrooms, with computer keys encrusted with dirt and crisp crumbs, the same he uses to communicate with the press. It is a boxy suit, with cropped wide trousers, as you’d picture an artist in his early forties wearing.
Despite a broader audience may at first dismiss Rafman’s work as superficial — or even childish — as a consequence of its memetic stance, his words encompass a depth as profound as his carnet of references. They flow with the rapidity of the internet language, and as copious as the amount of work he produces.
His art is, first of all, rooted in an observation of society, which the Canadian analyses with the critical spirit of a philosopher.
The most stringent issue that seems to equally fascinate and concern him is the fragmentation of contemporary culture and consciousnesses, which since his early works Rafman has been exploring through the creative potential of machine learning processes. His Instagram bio reads, ‘Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined’, which is exactly what his artworks do.
AI is the tool that enables him to observe society, like a camera.
‘I believe that similarly to how photography liberated painting from factual representation, AI image-making has the potential to do something equally revolutionary by forcing art to push itself beyond its own self-perceived boundaries.’
Rafman jokes quoting Renoir. ‘Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.’ However, although AI image generation can foster a new culture, he hopes that ‘questions about the broader historical implications on these developments are raised’.
When looking at some of his latest works — like the Club Angels II and Club Angels III series or Technocrats II — one is left wondering where the line of demarcation between the real and the hyperreal lies. The pieces, which at first appear like painted canvases, feature print AI-generated images to problematise ‘the expected sterility of algorithmically generated images, bringing their abstract digitally into physical materiality’.
‘That space is where I seek the most interesting territories to explore,’ says Rafman. ‘The virtual and the real represent a dichotomy, but in the world we live in it no longer exists.’
According to the artist, the German word aufhebung, which contains opposites, meaning abolition, transcendence, cancellation or fulfilment, informs his practice. ‘In my work, I try to reach a state of aufhebung between bathos and pathos, the ironic and the romantic, the physical and the virtual, and so on. That tension is mobilised in my media choices in the paintings as well.’
This theme emerges in Counterfeit Poast, a film composed of a series of character profiles where AI-generated images are animated using face-tracking iPhone apps, resulting in plausible stories that escalate into the realm of the hyperreal, equally disturbing and witty. To stand out is that of a single man obsessed since his childhood with teen idol Jonathan Brandis, to the point he ends up mystifying reality by forging the actor’s otherwise missing suicidal letter and psycho-physically morphing into Brandis himself. The opus encapsulates all of Rafman’s fascination for all things gravitating between the alienation of the individual and the sense of communal belonging of his chosen iconography.
In Rafman’s view, the opus ‘paints a portrait of a world where the very grounds of reality have become destabilised, a world where everyone has their own algorithmically tailor-made Reality fed to them.’
One can’t truly grasp whether such impossibility to trace a sociologically valid universal theory of present culture concerns Rafman, or whether he thrives on this chaos. Surely, the progressive fragmentation of universal symbols and icons and the increasing ‘niche-isation’ of culture is a reflection at the core of his practice. Especially for someone whose artistic research has been widely based upon permutations of appropriated content, spanning from fine art to mass marketing material. One of his most praised and extended works, 9 Eyes (2009-ongoing), systematically used Google Earth screenshots, for instance.
‘In the past we had the Church, the Bible, Greek myths and a set of languages that every educated person could understand. Even Andy Warhol’s symbols of language, the post-’50s mono-culture icons of Hollywood, are not available to us anymore. Now you have Twitch and Tik Tok stars, who can make millions but nobody has heard of them. Music is fragmented, every fetish, and every little thing is fragmented. So, I use the Internet language which I think is the closest to universal language we have.’
With the frequent sampling of elements of Internet and pop culture, the ethical dilemma of copyright and appropriation may open a multi-faceted debate. However, Rafman’s attitude towards the topic demonstrates how, despite the contemporary relevance of the work, his approach comes a long way.
‘I’m most curious about the social effects and the revelations they contain about our expectations of art both individually and as a society. When you take a bunch of things and put them together in a new way, that’s not even appropriation; it’s some new hybrid. That’s how culture works, through miscegeny, that’s how new musical genres emerge. Every nationalistic artist movement, for example, would go out into the countryside and look for folk culture and pull from it to elevate it to high culture. These days, it is slightly different because the whole high and low has collapsed. The internet flattens everything. You have 4Chan-style shitposts existing alongside a Renaissance masterpiece without hierarchy.’
In this tension between meta-narratives and lore lies Rafman’s freedom. It is very evident in the Egregore series, three 4k video suites in which images found on the internet are triptychally animated, juxtaposing elements as diverse as a wall clock filled with canned beans and the Garden of Bomarzo. Once again, the vastness of Rafman’s archive of found content echoes the breadth of his references, revealing an artist with many things to say and burning to expand his already immense world-building process. Rafman’s restlessness in giving birth to new works is somehow reminiscent of the overwhelming amount of content daily stratifying on the internet.
Questioned whether the choice of using a 16:9 screen ratio (the same of the ever so popular Instagram stories and Tik Tok videos) for the series was an attempt to evolve and update his register to the sharing and consumption of content, Rafman replies that, instead, the aim was that of taking a detour from what we associate with movies. ‘My idea was to treat them [the screens] like paintings, whereas when you see a 9:16 monitor you think of it like a film. I constantly have to deal with how to portray popular culture in my work. If you want to depict the present honestly, you have to confront the banality of living life in front of a screen. How do you depict a world dominated by screens, from computers to smartphones? How do you show screens within the screen-space of a film and keep it exciting and engaging? How do you make moving, cinematic work if so much of life takes place inside the impoverished space of the screen world? An exciting challenge as an artist is how to make screens interesting.’
Making Rafman’s art even more fascinating is the fact it unfolds over a highly conflictual field, which is that of the Internet and social media. On one hand it has been used — like in the case of 4Chan — as a countercultural tool to go against the status quo, on the other, the censoring policies of Meta have sanitised the medium, to borrow a Foucault expression. In the eyes of the Canadian, the problems lie in the platforms themselves which become a tool to observe and automatise modern subjectivity.
‘The internet is not new in these respects, but it exacerbates and reflects all humanity’s worst and best traits. Humans have been ostracising and dividing each other in power struggles for a long time. This condition is being made very transparent on the internet.
‘The only new system I have seen emerging is the Web3 crypto, which is still very tenuous. We still need to figure out how much influence and power it will have on culture in the long term. I’m curious, though.’
The use of elements coming from the culture of the deep web, of shitposting and trolling has nonetheless, over the years, put a stigma over artists like Rafman. This especially happened during the rise of Trumpism, which social media 4Chan and its most notoriously associated meme Pepe The Frog allegedly contributed to.
‘It is very clear there was a desert period during the Trump era,’ bitterly affirms Rafman, ‘the conversation within the art world shifted, focusing more on identity and portraiture, and now that trend has been exhausted.’
‘Just because something is problematic and a challenging subject matter, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be investigated and taken seriously, especially if its effects on culture are so profound and create the language of the Internet. Throughout history, artists have explored dark aspects of humanity, but that doesn’t mean they promote them. Instead, they are trying to be truthful and represent the human condition. Some much great art could have never been made if artists weren’t allowed to confront the horrors of existence.’
The curatorial status quo, though, seems to have now shifted. What used to be defined as Post-Internet has at last acquired a dignity that it was long stripped of. Rafman is radiant when commenting on the increasing amount of shows his colleagues are having.
Born in 2009, the movement never truly had a coherent ideology one could associate its artists with, nor a manifesto, although it is explicit the mutual sharing of certain themes and stylistic traits which are both a consequence of and limited by the Internet. Labels can be equally problematic and useful, as they nonetheless offer a source of reflection and a springboard to eventually combat them. Certainly, Rafman’s oeuvre captures the zeitgeist, both in its form and content. After all, its disorientating and thought-provoking element isn’t mere mannerism, but only a consequence of the brutal, conflicting and socially crumbling times we’re experiencing.
Today’s cancel culture does indeed strike another resemblance with the Middle Ages: the practice of pillorying people to expiate and punish their moral sins. This partially happened to Rafman and the other Post-Internet artists. Will we, at last accept, their social commentary, whether critically savage or disenchanted, or will their art continue to trigger us? That, perhaps, is the question we’re still left with.
