There are myriad approaches to having an art practice and career, especially in web3. There’s the near-daily minter who sees their every output as worthy of collecting. There’s the calculating CEO, mindful of their collectors as shareholders and the rising value of their work. There are the aesthetes, who seek beauty for its own sake. And there are the hardcore conceptualists whose work requires advanced degrees to appreciate.
The work of artist sgt_slaughtermelon navigates a sort of Middle Way between the aesthetes and the conceptualists. Rather than Id and Superego battling it out, his hold hands and skip merrily along. He leverages anonymity to be simultaneously as silly and serious as possible at the same time.
In his own words: “‘sgt_slaughtermelon’ is an ironic avatar for a body of work that exists in an age when taking oneself seriously is the first sign of retrograde motion: the stagnancy of traditionalism.”
Slaughtermelon’s approach to creating art echoes that of David Bowie, who used his knowledge of high art in service of mainstream pop stardom.
Likewise, Bowie was a matryoshka of personae, Bowie over the Thin White Duke over Aladdin Sane over Ziggy Stardust with no David Jones in sight. Slaughtermelon is likewise Lazlo Lissitsky, Brother Melon, Professor Melonius, Jesse Cathode, Sargei Slaughtermelovich, and more.
A student of theory-laden geometric abstraction à la Kazimir Malevich and László Moholy-Nagy (et al.), sgt_slaughtermelon approaches his work with a conceptual rigor downplayed by absurd narratives and semi-ironic nostalgia. He is both absolutely sincere and searching in his work and absolutely disavowing of high seriousness.
Imagine Daniel Day-Lewis only taking parts written for Seth Rogen. That’s the slaughtermelon way.
Collapsing Contradictions
The key to sgt_slaughtermelon’s approach to embracing contradiction is highlighted in the relatively minor project of his, Oedipus Red. The project was inspired when slaughtermelon noticed that “Red Money,” the closing track on David Bowie’s Lodger, was a reworking of Iggy Pop’s “Sister Midnight,” for which Bowie had written the music.
Where Pop wrote raw, impulsive lyrics and sang them in kind, Bowie was cerebral and calculating in his approach. To collapse these opposing but complementary approaches, slaughtermelon commissioned collaborator-friend Dusko to create a mashup of the two songs. To accompany this Frankenstein track, slaughtermelon created new work with his signature geometric approach collaged against more rough-hewn Id-like elements.
So why call it Oedipus Red?
For slaughtermelon, the balance struck between Bowie and Pop mirrored what he saw between Carl Jung’s erudite idealism and Sigmund Freud’s “grand ideas that turned out to be delusions.”
In his own words, “In the context of this art (pretentious as it is) — what I am doing is making David Bowie out to be the Carl Jung in this relationship and Iggy Pop is Sigmund Freud — but all of it is just two flawed ways of looking forward to a new paradigm where neither rational idealism and responsibility nor visceral preoccupations with sexuality and myth seems to help — but they remain so much more interesting than our modest new way of thinking.”
Note another key feature of slaughtermelon’s approach: the phrase “pretentious as it is” (and, in the earlier quote, “taking oneself seriously is the first sign of retrograde motion”).
Despite writing essays on each of his projects, slaughtermelon does nothing to promote these documents of thoughtfulness. Even within the essays that explicate a project, he is self-deprecating about his own tendency to intellectualize his work and makes every effort to counteract any heady conceptualism with absurdity and outright silliness.
Which brings us to…
Sargei Slaughtermelovich & Lazlo Lissitsky
“My earliest real collection of work had some pretty heavy thinking devoted to what I was calling ‘Neo-Suprematism’ – which is a super pretentious concept, but I figured I could get away with it since I had such a ridiculous artist name.“ — sgt_slaughtermelon on “Early Glitch and ‘Neo-Suprematism’”
Slaughtermelon draws significant inspiration from the Russian avant-garde, particularly Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, which was an abstract art movement that focused on basic geometric forms (squares, circles, etc.) in order to emphasize pure artistic feeling.
According to slaughtermelon, his works of Suprematism combined with pixel-sorted glitch art aesthetics are “at once both an aspiration towards the highest of geometric abstraction in the spirit of the Russian avant-garde of Malevich and a willing admission of ignorance and irony.”
In his continued obsession with “non-objective” art, sgt_slaughtermelon has continued to develop and discard new personae on whom to project his sincerity. As an art of “pure feeling,” slaughtermelon is uncomfortable without context (e.g., people, places, or things), perhaps because pure feeling is, well, quite naked.
To that end, in addition to sgt_slaughtermelon (not his birth name), he has a host of alter-alter egos, including:
- Sargei Slaughtermelovich, a forgotten artist within Malevich’s inner circle
- Lazlo Lissitzky — the stylistic love child of László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzsky, and an assortment of Swiss Modern designers — whose work was co-opted and cheapened by mass consumerism
- The Moniac Mod, the earliest generative artist, who used a pirated version of a Russian water-powered computer to generate hipster mod designs
- Myron Starets, a planetarium employee who “secretly crafted binders full of CDs of his last will and testament in the form of laser shows”
All of which are as fun as they are unnecessary, since he’s traversed a boggling range of styles as sgt_slaughtermelon with all sorts of collaborators, including Amanda Harville, jrdsctt, FiveTimesNo, Dawnia Darkstone, and Salmonmatte Studios.
Many of these collaborations even have documented lore, but it’s perhaps too much to get into here. Suffice it to say, slaughtermelon leans heavily on absurd and ironic storytelling to simultaneously distance himself from and embrace work that aspires to something as bare as pure feeling.
Do You Want to Feel Something?
An entirely new style has crept into being in the sgt_slaughtermelon oeuvre. This new approach gives breathing room to the previously sidelined storytelling instinct while holding court with his familiar semi-ironic nostalgia.
Combining the visual look and feel of ‘90s operating systems with text-based art and hypertext fiction, this new style allows slaughtermelon a more direct route for exploring his deeper philosophical preoccupations without resorting to earnestness or grand pronouncements.
Bringing the world of interactive text-based experiences into web3 and digital art collecting, Do You Want To Feel Something? (2023) is slaughtermelon’s most ambitious work to date. In it, an incisive operating system leads you through a series of system prompts designed to interrogate your innermost self.
The opening prompt is, unsurprisingly, Do you want to feel something?
Your only options are “I can’t” or “I’m so tired, I want to be numb.”
From there, you are guided through a journey out of and deeper into ennui and existential dread.
DYWTFS doesn’t let you steer only toward positive or negative directions, i.e., you can’t choose only gloomy options nor only cheery options. Instead, in this sort of aggressive therapy session, if you try to go all dark you’ll reach a prompt where there are only hopeful options. Likewise, if you choose every optimistic option along the way, you’ll hit an impasse where every option is a bummer. There is no way out.
Yet again, we find sgt_slaughtermelon embracing what we thought was a contradiction but turns out to just be the human condition. Happiness and numbness, joy and despondence, hope and depression can and, in fact, do coexist simultaneously.
The other contradiction at play has to do with expectations. You have clicked into a hypertext fiction presented as a comically retro operating system with a Lisa Frank color palette and NFTs by a guy who calls himself sgt_slaughtermelon.
Har har.
But as you click through, screen after screen presents confrontationally introspective questions you’d be abashed by even with your therapist.
At a point in playing through DYWTFS, you might get the sense that sgt_slaughtermelon has been playing a long con just to get you to lower your guard.
In his earlier work, slaughtermelon papered over his Modernist earnestness with all of the ironic tools available to him. With this new approach — which will continue with the upcoming Macintosh-themed I Am Not Good At Computer — he openly embodies this spirit of ironic sincerity and sincere irony.
Across his body of work, sgt_slaughtermelon aspires to genuine emotional expression while neither falling into pie-eyed idealism nor po-faced cynicism, a different kind of Middle Way, an embrace of contradiction as the best way toward an art that makes you feel something.
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