Disillusioned

Milo Conroy: Essentials for Survival

Since everyone is now a curator—aesthetically, and aspirationally, arranging life—”Disillusioned” offers a refuge for the professional curator: Here, s/he is given license to conceptually arrange everyone’s world.

 

Essentials for Survival

Milo Conroy

 

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What can’t you live without? This question is a staple of dating profile cutenesses, celebrity get-to-know-you interviews and high school athlete spotlights. Hypothetical “leaked google/yahoo/facebook job interview” desert island scenarios prompt lists of favorite albums, requests for sumptuous blondes, preferred brands of sunscreen as well as the inevitable “helicopter and pilot” responses. Beyond the Bob Marley and Sriracha answers that pepper the bright and relatable surface of casual internet browsing lies a grim community of bloggers, who take a far more serious approach to this question. A culture of highly competent and anxious DIYers known as “Preppers” or “Survivalists” devote blogs, forums and youtube videos to explaining what they can’t live without. Preppers are united in the belief that the end is nigh, whether via global warming, Chinese invasion, super-virus, meteors, Obama imposed martial law, or the wrath of god, you won’t catch these guys and gals without an Altoids tin medical kit in the pocket of their army jacket and a landmine underneath their pillow. Through comparison, I developed an affection for the aforementioned websites and online cultures. It was touching to examine the many different qualifiers of Essentials for Survival, highlighting the array of neuroses and psychological implications that surface when humans are asked to list what they hold most dear. List making, in this way, functions as a nearly unconscious and wholly unacademic form of curation. When making a list, only your opinion matters, choice and contemplation are allowed to exist solely on a personal level. For my curation I was compelled to muddle the practices of these divergent list makers, splicing their sincerity into the hybrid below. Simply put, is the perceived need for Netflix Instant any less insane than that of imperishable coffee beans for your bomb shelter?

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Things I could not live without:

1. Mommy time
2. An apocalypse conscious child
3. My bow and quiver full of arrows
4. Deepak ChopraTM DVD
5. Radiation Resistant Coffee
6. TeavanaTM Oprah Chai
7. JuicyTM Clutch
8. Voodoo TacticalTM Leg Strap First Aid Kit
9. TH-2008HC High Power Electric Fence Generator
10. iPad mini retina display Pandora OneTM Rihanna Station
11. Proforce EquipmentTM Commando Wire Saw
12. Devouring chocolate

Milo Conroy is a young person who lives in New York.
"Disillusioned" is a section of DIS Magazine created by Sarah Lookofsky that takes on art and art-related matter that aims to disentangle and dissect how the practices of art might relate to other spheres of production. This partially involves dissolving old assumptions about the aesthetic disciplines, such as discernment, distinction, and disinterestedness, but it will also address how new modes dissolve old forms, allowing for new mechanisms of dispersal, distribution and display to emerge. But more importantly, it will examine how art is increasingly entangled with regimes of distraction, disingenuous affirmation and disposable culture. Disabused will therefore also be a place where arts professionals can express their discomfort and discouragement, even their disgruntlement and disgust; temporarily dissociate from or disown their sites of production; or enact dissent, dissidence, disruption and disobedience. We will do our best to make sure this is all done with the utmost discretion, of course.

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