The Crystal Palace
“LardLabs, LLC.” in practice is a living-visual #commentary on global capitalism. Lard’s critique plays homage to Dostoevsky’s Crystal Palace, “the imperial culture museum.” But unlike the Crystal Palace LardLabs isn’t tethered to Western idealism, quite the opposite.
Lard purposefully reverse engineers global capitalism to replace institutional innovation with artistic ingenuity to transform his life’s work #EavVolcano from a literal expression of aesthetics to a self-regenerating absurdity machine #Lardverse: an Ode to Plato’s love for the #artist.
Lard is performing capitalism so he says, when he wears the institution like a skin, blurring the lines between business and art. Lard finds it humorous that his work can be capitalized on, but monetization is not his soul purpose. It is a convenient byproduct. Lard’s actual intent is to force a witness to induce a visual-intervention.
For superficially his flagship project: “Welcome to the Lardverse” is a mirror to consumer culture, but we go deeper and witness Lard, the jester in the court of capitalism, provoking a state of psychological warfare. In action he is the living-projection of electronic entanglement, “the k[n]ot sphere,” as he prefers to call it.
In his museum-performance Lard exposes that the fail of globalization is not the enmeshment of humanity into its grasp, but humanity’s failure to recognize this enmeshment.
He argues culture is distracted by culture’s obsession with perfection and unity, the cult of the round that we get lost in our own propaganda. We submit ourselves to struggle on principle. Misery loves company and we, the “terror-consumers” of global capitalism are obsessed with comfort and uniformity.
Lard asks us the hard question, “Ever wonder why ‘ally’ is the word of choice to those who only know how to resist?” Lard responds, “The modern tower was not built to welcome utopia.” Global capitalism evokes a crisis of narrative, a state of terror-rupture. Worse, it conjures constant change. Its grid is a minefield. No “1” is safe. But that is Lard’s point, programs are meant to be broken. Humans reduced to zeros and ones are not simply cogs in a wheel; we are fragments of an infinite-pieced puzzle, to be solved and not solved, an infinite amount of times.
Global capitalism doesn’t simply remove humans from the center, it obliterates all centers. All or nothing simultaneously. “Center” is rendered a nonsense word and attempting to own it is just as absurd.
Owning center is the curse of culture. Culture is addicted to control and enmeshment can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tethered to the grid the masses can’t help but fight over shapes, they turn the legacy of the Crystal Palace into a time capsule. Dare we say tomb? The Palace evokes boredom as a monument to someone else’s ideal. It is a GMO seed, it was never meant to grow. Why regurgitate its model? Global capitalism is a war-machine.
“LardLabs” is an eco-machine, ever-evolving, ever-adapting, and always choosing to thrive. No excuses. Lard is the seed that grows in the darkness. The bird that burns brighter than the sun. Lard is.
