DESIGN

Jesse has passed so his actions, or as you will see non-actions, must speak for him. His main focus while I studied dealt with the social impact of technology; not just for society, but for the common individual as well. I believe he saw me as a “native son” attempting to express and assert my manhood in a constructive, non-violent manner via the use of technology at my disposal – and he responded as a moral man.

Instead of subverting and distorting my artistic expression, he watched and waited. I must assume his non-action to be informed by his own experience, since he lived during the expressionist architectural movement; and may have read or been inspired by The Glass Chain.

However, as a Jew, he also lived the demise of Expressionism and the triumph of a German Zeitgeist – Spirit of the Age – featuring, in my opinion, the development of a fascist soulless style.

Buried beneath the pomp and circumstance of the International movement was its loss of soul, in favor of embracing machine uniformity and its implied social conformity.

I would say this is particularly the case when its practitioners abandoned applying polychromatic color in favor of the “white box” which, for certain audiences, could be construed as an eloquent and subtly elegant symbol of white nationalism.

With this as his background, I must have been a breath of fresh air for Jesse with my cartoonish chicken scratch. My work spoke for itself, I followed an inward reality.