artifice
[ahr-tuh-fis]
- a clever trick or stratagem; a cunning, crafty device or expedient; wile.
- trickery; guile; craftiness.
- cunning; ingenuity; inventiveness.
- a skillful or artful contrivance or expedient.
Some years back, I met a man who presented himself as something of a success story — someone who had escaped the design rat race by taking risks and reorienting his practice away from the professional world. “Be like me,” he said.
This was not an interesting man.
Then one day the seams in the façade began to show, and he began to fall apart.
This was an interesting man.
Pedro Almodóvar's 2004 film La Mala Educación is built entirely on these seams. A struggling film director, Enrique, reunites with his first love, who brings him a compelling script based on their time in Catholic school and the abuse he faced at the hands of Padre Manolo. They begin filming this story while we observe the various histories of the characters unfold in parallel. Eventually, Enrique finds out that his love is not his love, but rather his love's younger brother, Juan, who is concurrently having a consensual relationship with the priest who abused his brother. Roles are constantly swapping, and no one really is who they say they are. As the film goes on, the seams of artifice begin to unravel.
You could say this is true of many things. Life. Design. By nature of our profession, we designers are skillfully adept at all that is artifice. However, whereas the film deliberately shows its hand through the film-within-a-film plot, both design and life constantly attempt to make artifice reality. It's only when we begin to pay attention that we see the seams.
And it’s only now that I’ve noticed those seams in Daniels’ work. My gut reaction when I first viewed it was: "This is the work?” I expected something else, I suppose, but I was also given no title to go by (I’ll come back to this later). As I’m spiraling, trying to make sense of it all, others begin coming in to view the work. Their approval or disapproval is evident as they ask what I think, but I can barely pay attention. My hand has to touch the brown globs of wheatpaste left over on the paper. In that moment, something about this remnant was more captivating to me.
And this is what has made Daniels' work so difficult to categorize — its artifice. The progression of his work has gone something like this: site-specific installation, wheatpasted toe painting, crow painting, and now risographed Processing images wheatpasted onto the crit room wall. There is a patina of artifice that is hard to shake.
In his review of Rey Carlson’s my dad was kind but he knew nothing of roses, Daniels starts off with a confession, “People keep asking me what it’s like to be back in Michigan. I tell you, it’s weird. It feels like digging up a grave buried years ago & finding an old life sitting upright, brushing dirt off its jacket, wondering what took so long.” Since moving back to Michigan to attend grad school, I've been thinking a lot about things, too, especially the things that had been stuffed down for years, showing up with emotional force, as Daniels would say. And this untitled work is holding me hostage, forcing me to sit with it.
Now, a review should focus on the work, not the person, but I mentioned earlier that I was given no title. I think that was intentional. I think Daniels wants us to reference him. And the best place to pull this is from his bio:
I was born in the suburbs of Michigan in 1991. I cried a lot, so my mom put me in the basement to cry myself to sleep. I liked the basement. It was cool and quiet. When it's quiet, I can think, and I like to think.
Later, I found other kids who liked basements. They wrote sad songs about how hard life is and played them down there. They could play a lot of notes, but they couldn't sing. I liked that. It sounded honest. I tried making music, but it didn't work out. So I made pictures instead. I call it art. Other people call it graphic design. I don't see the difference.
I went to Kendall College of Art and Design to think about art. Then I got tired of Michigan and moved to New York. I love New York. It's on a grid, which is comforting. It also smells like garbage. I like what happens when things are loved so much they start to fall apart. I got too good at graphic design that I forgot how to make things like the sad kids in the basement.
Now I'm at Cranbrook Academy of Art, trying to remember.
So, what are we looking at here, then? Let me describe what you see first. There are many colorful papers risographed with imagery, made in Processing, I’m told, each with a stripe running through the middle, so that, when aligned correctly, they form a collective slash pattern across the wall. And what does a slash do? It divides. It negates. It's also a mark of crossing something out. These wheat-pasted papers are also not cleanly applied to the wall. There is evidence of the material left over, and the corners are beginning to curl up – the seams are literally beginning to show.
I recall walking in on him once while he was making a batch of that wheatpaste for the first project in this huge bowl. He was scurrying back and forth from his studio and kitchen with ritualistic regularity. Rituals like these are often comforting. Why wheatpaste, though? It's a choice Daniels has made repeatedly, and it's not a passive one — the act of making wheatpaste and applying it is labor-intensive, physical, and embodied. Previous critiques have read this as Daniels not knowing how to engage with the medium. I'd argue it’s something else: what we are seeing is the residue of a performance he never shows us. The audience has consistently shown that they are more interested in the makings of his work than in what ends up on the wall. Daniels knows this and safeguards it anyway. That residue — those curling corners, those brown globs — those are the seams.
Yves Klein’s Anthropométries (1960) is a good comparison — I would call this work the residue of a performance (though Klein is more explicit about its origins than Daniels). Like Daniels, Klein was beginning to find his work monotonous and recognized his career needed a change. Enter the Anthropométries. By directing models to create the work, Klein creates a sort of distance between himself and the work – a dynamic in which the viewer cannot ignore the person behind the work; there is Yves Klein (Anthropométries) and the painting (Anthropométries). (Yves Klein's Anthropometries: painting with nudes, 2022) Daniels does something similar in using Processing to create these images. Yes, you code the image, but you are directing the software (the library) to create those images, which creates a distance between you and the final result.
However, while Klein is generally agreed to be a performance artist, what about someone whose work is not so explicitly so, like Daniels’? I present Robert Ryman and his white paintings as a useful mirror. Like Daniels’ current piece, Ryman refused to title his paintings (or, if he did, only the brand of paint used). Ryman also generally painted with white, and this color comprises most of his work. (Robert Ryman | Untitled | Whitney Museum of American Art, n.d.) What the viewer is left with is the brushstroke, the thickness of the paint, and the creator's decision-making. The “residue” on the wall is simply a map of Ryman’s movements. Daniels’ repetition does so similarly.
And so the work's biggest downfall is its inability to shake what he got too good at. Design's ultimate goal is to make artifice real — to close the seams. But Daniels can't quite do it, and I don't think he wants to. Yes, the risograph and the wheat-pasting application are both attempts to break away from that. Daniels signals that to us with the collective slashes he has created, and his attempts at trying out new software. The seams keep showing, though. That's the work.
Why does a designer who forgot how to make things like the sad kids need a screen of code and wheatpaste? I don't think artifice functions as a lie in Daniels' work, but rather as a buffer against vulnerability. Almodóvar shows us this — artifice is the only way these characters can confront what they have experienced without vulnerability.
Now, I recognize there is a great deal of self-projection going on here, and I know that criticism without skin in the game doesn't land. So here it is: moving back to Michigan has turned up some stones. It feels like an unfinished reckoning — not in my practice, but in me. I know what it is to use artifice as a buffer, what it costs to keep it up, and how hard it is to put down. Imagine someone telling you it's all artifice. I didn't have to.
If Daniels wants to use this medium authentically, he either needs to take it back to the street, where the stakes are real, or find a way to make the stakes real inside the room. If the police aren't going to fine or arrest you for putting paper on a wall, then the only risk left is emotional exposure.
The ritual has to eventually cost something. Otherwise, it's just a more elaborate buffer. How do we do that? Sarah Dorweiler identifies three ways to interpret repetition in minimalist art: as a refocusing element, as a spiritual and meditative act, and as a personal practice. The act of making wheatpaste—the boiling of water, the stirring, the physical labor of smoothing wet paper onto a wall—is deeply meditative. Daniels still feels drawn to this medium because it offers a grounding, physical ritual. I think this ritual is exactly how he — and perhaps how I — can begin to bridge the gap between artifice and honesty.But here is the danger: ritual that remains without vulnerability is just a repetitive mask of artifice; it must eventually be sacrificed. A ritual is meant to transform the practitioner. If the ritual serves only to build a thicker wall between the creator and the audience, it isn't a spiritual act but a defensive one. I struggle to identify a successful path forward that doesn't involve a total collapse of this buffer. Daniels must stop using the ritual to hide and start using it to reveal.
I’m not being sensationalist. There are real stakes for one’s practice and life if this isn’t heeded. Almodóvar exacts an ending that is at once precise and brutal: Juan, who used his brother Angel’s identity and trauma to get what he wanted, ends up trapped by the same logic, blackmailed by Padre Manolo into becoming, permanently, the person he had been pretending to be. The artifice swallows him. He doesn't escape it; he becomes it. And Enrique, he soars to success.
So what happened to the man in my story? I reached out, some years later, looking for something like an answer. I never heard back. Someone told me things had gone back to normal after I left. The seams, I suppose, had been restitched.
What stays with you isn't the resolution — it's that none of them offer one. They show you the seams and leave you to sit with what's underneath. The answer, if there is one, must come from within you. No one else can provide it. Trust me, I've tried.