LILY PRILLINGER

Sentimental Corrosion , 2006
metallic resurfacing paint on panels with 3-dimensional text, series of ten paintings, each painting: 11 x 14 inches

"Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence." (Don DeLillo - White Noise)

Sentimental Corrosion is about passive and active emotional deterioration. The texts used in this series are not my 'original' sentiments: they are lyrics from 'easy listening' love songs from the 1970's. In some ways, these sentiments may as well be my own because their bland, saccharine verses have been lodged in my mind for decades, arguably serving no function other than to provide some protracted sense of nostalgic meaningfulness.

Nostalgia is an interesting feeling in that it conveys a yearning for that which is irrecoverable. The term itself is a doomed mélange (nostos - meaning "return home" + algos "pain".) Nostalgia is a homesickness of sorts. As feelings go, it has several effects. Fully felt, nostalgia wields an odd, sentimental power because it privileges a desire for relief that is encapsulated in a larger reality of despair. When nostalgia's false remedy is applied, the 'emptiness' of the present tense is ostensibly 'filled' with the sentimental 'fullness' of the remembered past --- (however: this sense of sentimental fullness is ultimately realized as empty because it no longer exists, making the present tense seem even emptier than it was in its original state of perceived emptiness, which nostalgic impulse was trying to relieve in the first place.) As a result, nostalgia cannot offer true relief but rather, presents further sentimental devastation. Bummer.

Love songs are popularized nostalgia. Even though their themes are engineered to appeal to a mass audience, they can be applied to the specific associations of misery and bliss of the individual listener. I chose to use the lyrics of these old love songs as the text in my project because I felt that they held more sentimental power based on their timeworn familiarity. Given the etymological meaning of the word nostalgia (return home + pain), songs such as " Precious and Few" by Climax are eerily poignant in their lyrics if not musically:

And if I can't find my way back home, it just wouldn't be fair.
Precious and few are the moments we two can share

Old, sallow love songs appeal to me because their lyrics can be interpreted as both sincere and insincere depending on one's level of cynicism. Because of this, I felt that these types of lyrics could operate as the nostalgic fulcrum of this project. There was a time when lyrics felt like sincere sentiments to me. As a child, I would hear these types of songs on the radio and they perplexed me. I didn't quite understand what the songs meant, but I listened to them as narratives - What were these sad, repetitive stories? I would think to myself. As a six-year-old child listening to these songs, I had not experienced the reality of 'love gone wrong', but based on any number of these songs; I had the distinct sense that love caused misery and anguish. The songs' language was simplistic and accessible to a child's point of view, but the 'adult themes' provoked lurid interpretation. It was unclear what the specific meaning of each set of lyrics was, but collectively the lyrics allegorized longing and loss on a titanic scale. All of these songs spun an immense sonic nostalgia for lost love, spent passion, and bad breaks. The songs taught me that if it was 'good' it could turn 'bad' …but whatever "it" was, it was worth it. The bland volatility of Romance swept across the lyrics in muted allusions of agony and ecstasy. Ripely opaque lyrics in combination with obligatory, soaring melodies seemed to foreshadow one shapeless thing: the sorrowful, aimless loneliness of adulthood. As a child I had the profound sense that these songs were jazzy talismans for the woeful sensualist: the Contemporary Adult.

Now as a 'contemporary adult' myself, I feel a keenly layered sense of nostalgia whenever I hear these old songs being played. On one hand, I realize that the songs as 'popular music' were most likely originally manufactured to manufacture nostalgia in the minds of a mass audience. After all, love songs will always be popular because the theme is universally resonant. And yet, as I listen to them now, I feel nostalgia for my own childhood, as I yearn for that which is irrecoverable: innocence, optimism, simplicity. As I recognize these irrecoverable states of being, I am struck by how universal my own nostalgic desires are, and I am a little disappointed to feel so ordinary. I would like very much to feel less ordinary, as 'feeling special' would give my life meaning, or so it seems.

Love Songs are interesting because they are both intensely personal yet weirdly applicable to large groups. As popularized nostalgia, love songs, function on an interesting level. While it is hard to believe that a mass audience chooses to feel anguish collectively, it is clear that misery-cloaked-in-love sells. What are the factors that make a 'creative expression' relevant to a mass audience? The sentiments proposed by these love songs are constructed like rudimentary, modular volumes in some romantic Legoland. Their shapes are a hybrid of specific and generic descriptions recognizable to anyone. I think it's safe to say that lyrics such as "you don't bring me flowers anymore" can be metaphorically jammed into the resentful mind of any disgruntled spouse and it will hold a generically-specific meaning. However, too much lyrical specificity risks the possibility of losing mass appeal. To illustrate this fact, I have composed some of my own lyrics to a 'love song' that are not likely to appeal to a mass audience.

I really don't like that plaid shirt you're wearing / I don't like the colors / The last time you wore it we had an argument / It's a eallybad look for you / It makes your skin look yellow and flaky / That mole on your forehead looks weird / Is it skin cancer? / What if that scabby mole is killing you? / Maybe you should get that checked / I resent the fact that you don't worry about me the same way that I worry about you / I don't think you would care if I died

One person's love song is another person's banal confession. There is a fine line between an honest expression, which may hold meaning for one person, and one that is deliberately cultivated to engender sympathy and appreciation by a larger group.

It is clear that successful, popular love songs operate on some mundanely profound frequency. On one hand the 'profound' concepts such as love proliferate, but the expression is formally mundane. Popular music promotes vivid hierarchies of itself within itself: glam-rock, lite-rock, punk, funk, psychadelic, alternative, rap, indie, rhythm + blues, soul, hip hop, country, folk, metal. Obvious cross marketing strategies might be junk but they work. All its distinctions are meaningless because the one true goal of popular music, despite the claims of its producers, is easy listening. Easy listening is easy for a reason: it's easy to listen to and it's easy to make, it's easy to reduce and it's easy to produce. Thematically, popular music pitches itself like an elite club where those who are admitted experience exotic and exalting feelings, but in reality any old hobo can belong if they want to. Its members feel special, and yet are quite ordinary. The only thing you need to do to be admitted is to believe the expressions and the styles hold meaning. I feel the same is true of Contemporary Art. The art world surveys and promotes themes that are deemed to be culturally relevant. The cognoscenti listen intently, and are self-admitted with belief-as-ticket, only to strike a pose on the inside and to go home alone. In this sense, this series is about Contemporary Art: the way it is manufactured, the way it is produced, the way it is deliberately relevant to our lives while being totally irrelevant. Lite rock, less talk.

To further illustrate this allegory in these paintings, I chose the text to represent a genre of popular music that is currently recognized as total crap. Mellow, easy and lite - the Sounds of the Seventies were lovelorn and lax. Years ago these songs were hits because they were considered cool, casual reflections of contemporary life. Now they suck. The songs haven't changed but fashion has. The songs might well be ridiculous, but their failure to remain current says more about the fickle lifespan of trends than it does about its themes, like "love", that are eternally relevant. Similarly, I think that contemporary art is more concerned with being current than it is with being eternally relevant. In Sentimental Corrosion I was trying to demonstrate that trends are often the sole content of art, and like fashion, are eternally relevant only in obsolescence. As the rusty surface indicates, trends cannot endure, and Contemporary Art (by definition) cannot either.

Fashion, and the trends that define it, is hardwired to nostalgia. Nostalgia, as the title of this project suggests, is a sentimental corrosion. It seems that sentiments can both inflict and suffer damage. "Rust", while a chemical process, seems to demonstrate this pervasive duality on a visual basis. After all, rust is something that conveys decay, as a noun and a verb simultaneously. As a result I felt that rust presented a tidy allegory of how 'feelings' impact emotional perception. I felt that the dual qualities of rust (active and passive) demonstrated the blurred interplay between the content and context of feelings, or 'sentiments' There are three visual elements to these paintings: (1) text, (2) the surrounding field that the text occupies, (3) rust. I feel that the presence of corrosion can be perceived as an active and a passive thing. In this series, "rust" dominates both the text (content) and the surrounding field (context). Diagrammatically, the context of the text may cause the content to corrode, or perhaps, the content of the text is the source of corrosion for the entire project. I will never know for sure… but as the songs suggests "Feelings" are "nothing more than feelings."