Zima Blue is a gorgeous piece of television. That, we can all agree on. But going through the posts on this subreddit, I'm seeing a lot of people asking about the point of it. So this is my interpretation, with my limited background in philosophy and art history.
My craft is music, specifically art music that doesn't usually sound very pleasant. Zima Blue is obviously dealing with visual art, but that's alright, as the two have a lot of parallels with the art movements that take place, and when you get down to brass tacks, visual art is just decorating space, while music is decorating time. I figure I should get that out of the way, as this is just my opinion and interpretation, and in no way definitive.
The inclusion of the blue circles in Zima's hyper-realistic paintings is probably the hardest pill to swallow; why ruin a great piece of art with something that takes no skill to do? This is a great question, and one that can be answered in two ways; 'why not?', and 'ruin?'
Art ultimately is about intent, and the brilliant book 'Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That' does a wonderful break down of how the more abstract genres of art are more than just collections of random noise (be it noise on a canvas, or in a concert hall).
The Zima Blue is very similar to the colour fields of Rothko, part of the Abstract Expressionism art movement. The Zima Blue colour taking up more and more space on the canvas with each painting is similar in a way to the Dadaist rejection of art- Marcel Duchamp famously took a urinal, placed it on its side, and submitted it to an exhibition. This is because the Dadaist movement was concerned with making anti-art; a protest to the aestheticism of modern capitalism. This manifested in Zima's work as a rejection of the higher-purpose of seeking a deeper meaning.
Artists love to naval gaze, and search for meaning, and express themselves through their artworks. As Zima became more advanced, the possibilities of what he could do also expanded; he could wade through lava, exist on desolate planets without any issues. Despite his increased capabilities, they did nothing to help him find meaning for himself.
The only time his life had meaning was when he was cleaning the pool tiles. The obsession with the Zima Blue was because meaning is entirely self-directed, informed by your capabilities. "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
Whether Zima's 'purpose' to clean tiles was his own choice or not, and whether that matters, is another whole essay in itself; one could argue that the rejection of self-directed meaning is an implicit endorsement of capitalism, which would probably go against the rest of the thrust of Zima's performance art-piece.
The performance-art aspect of Zima's degradation to his original state is quite powerful; putting it on as a display to the crowds reflects a mirror back onto them, asking the audience why they are searching for a deeper meaning through someone else's art (and consequently, life experiences). This is why Zima agreed to be interviewed- to provide context to his art, as without context, modern art is totally meaningless (which is a big reason why your five year old couldn't do that).
Then, we see the blue, and realise that the audience is an insert for us. We are watching a television program in hope of finding a deeper meaning, which is wholly and utterly meaningless, as purpose and meaning are entirely self-derived. Meaning can be anything- something as simple as cleaning pool tiles, or perhaps writing about the meaning of an episode about a robot that decides to clean pool tiles.
Submitted April 01, 2019 at 04:31AM by rcgy https://ift.tt/2U8YmkD
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