Why the Goat, a Clamsplanation by Stevens Brosnihan

Once again, the Clamticians have implored me to delve into the viscera of my creative faculties to expose an aspect of reality best explored via the unshackled mode of the visual arts. Today I am departing from my usual format and medium in an effort to expand modalities while at the same time embracing the lure of the literal.

Evidently, Clamedia International LTD is receiving an unprecedented number of angry and/or perplexed demands for an explanation as to why we have chosen a member of genus Capra (see below)

as opposed to Crassostrea (or phylum mollusca for that matter) to represent our corporate identity.

To be honest, we are all at a loss for words. We had an excessively heated and disastrously long argument about how best to ‘explain’ to our dedicated readers the significance of our choice. We came to blows, but then, we always do at corporate functions.

After a shit-ton of Jello™ shots and a few peyote buttons, I managed to ‘phase out’ long enough to pen this missive. In an effort to dispel any misinterpretations, I will approach the solution to this complex mystery with a straightforward answer.

Gloucester Gothic, Goat Simulator, 2014

Ever since Kline’s voyeuristic prequel to Warhol’s ongoing and self-proclaimed sham, the art world has mourned the death of the avant-garde. Serious, exuberant discourse has given way to the absurd and to a complete loss of cultural identity. Like the universe’s first milliseconds, we are in an age where matter(the object) and energy(critical thought) are interchangeable and unfocused. There have been repeated attempts to coalesce this dark matter into something bold and philosophically evolved, but the results thus far have only been a series of commodifiable, and predictably inscestuous hacks. The art world exists for its own sake alone.

Yves Kline happening, 1960

Now, the deterministic nature of the image is counteracted by the mind’s inability to filter the synaptic misfirings we equate with the miasma of non-linear and inchoate, pre-determinate metaphors. It is a fugue state from which we can never recover. The Image is continuously replaced by facsimiles of itself, branching fractally through iterations of the real only to be undone by it’s own interconnectedness with space-time. In effect, the object becomes that which it is not by revealing its underlying false self, only to be reborn again as infinitely variable simulacra.

Grazing, Goat Simulator, 2014

Cultural indifference to or complete unawareness of humor has it’s roots in fascism. The right has usurped the left by implementing the chauvinistic mechanisms of design and appropriating ontological realms hither-to associated with anarchic ideologies. Humor has the potential to disrupt our concept of what is true while simultaneously exposing reality subversively, operating on the audience’s preconceptions to [de]construct a new, accepted norm. The sheep, or goats as it were, are in wolves’ clothing, ideology is dead, and humor must prevail.

Ascension, Goat Simulator, 2014