Instagram is a fantasy on which the artist presents art that is not their art. It’s a fetishictic game of “let’s pretend”. We all know it’s “let’s pretend”. But we go along with it anyway. We have to. We like to. It satisfies. It satiates. There seems to be no alternative to the square gods.

This displacement of desire or loss followed by disavowal is what Jacques Lacan calls “fetishistic disavowal”: the unconscious objectification of desire or loss displaced onto another object as fantasy. Yet in Lacan’s analysis the fetish is a fear of over-proximity to the object of desire, contra-Freud’s ever-reaching hand for the ever-distant & lost object of desire.

The Insta image feeds off this desire & the loss of the art object we mourn without a tear. Like when tears don’t quite come at the funeral of a loved one until later, much later, & when least expected.

Some 5 years ago I invested some time in experiencing a web art installation that some artist sent me from stateside. It didn’t really work for me in a sensory or intellectual capacity. It was more message than medium, & as we all know “the medium is the message”.

Today I experienced a web installation entitled “Dog-Eared Paradise” by Olivia Normile on the pragmatically named “Screen Service”, which broke the solitaire tiles of Instagram.

I’m too close to it now to know why it worked, if “worked” is the right word: its half-tone mapping; its cardboard cut-out sensibility; its absurd theatre; its cuteness; its Gilliam hand-gesturing “click” “follow” & “touch”; its sense of play & erasure of all-too human angst for foraging animals; down low, up high, this way that…; line; negative; space; penned-in; but no square god in sight; & thus “liberation” (the artist’s word).

It brought to mind (among many other things): Patrick Jolley’s film This Monkey; Kai Althoff’s settings for his paintings; Lars von Trier's Dogville; Arthur Schopenhaur’s will-to-live philosophy of animals; The Theatre of the Absurd; & this quote by Alexandre Kojève, “man is a fatal disease of the animal”. But words & references are just another form of fetishistic disavowal.