This is clearly, I assume, the end of the movement; let us proverbially “pore one out for the homies.” but I digress from my time spent with the movement it had always been clear that it was doomed to fail and I will be quick to point at the lack of focus as not the only reason of its demise but merely that the movement does not really believe in any sort of change at all but a continuation of the economic system with the minor tweaks to close the gap. We want to believe the corporations are bad but don’t take away our Iphones!!
What is most striking to me is that these people want to believe in great sweeping social programs for the commons yet still maintain the deplorable level of elitism that they assumedly are fighting against.
“On Thursday, the matter at hand was a proposal from Pulse — the group of drummers — for $8,000 for new musical instruments. They say they hoped to secure the funding after a $5,000 handmade drum was sabotaged and destroyed during a rain storm. They say that because they’ve been there since Day 1, they deserve the funding more than anyone. ‘We have worked for you! Appreciate us!’ the leader of the proposal shouted angrily to the GA in response to voices of dissent.”
As if this movement is about a badge of honor, at this moment I am too angry to write.
But here is some bling to go with the topics of last week.
As I live through the third recession to take place during my career in the art world I’ve been reflecting on the value of an education in the arts. In his 1762 novel, Emile, Jean Jacques Rousseau sought to design the perfect educational programme for the raising of universal citizens. Does such a thing exist in art education? Let me suggest some rules for young artists and curators to live by that are not taught in art school. Take them or leave them. Use them or abuse them.
1. Art hurts
By this I am not thinking about Chris Burden’s self-crucifixion on the hood of a Volkswagen, Ron Athey performances, or the dramaturgy of professional wrestling. It is possible to have a career in the art world but the odds of making a killing financially are low. Of course this isn’t the reason why people become infatuated with the arts but it is clear that not everyone becomes Andy Warhol, Bono or Andy Kaufman. Upon learning that I had decided against going to law school, my mother (an artist) asked me: ‘How will you support yourself in the manner to which you’re accustomed?’ As I grew up wearing hand-me-downs from my older brothers, a career in the arts was exactly what I needed to support myself in the manner to which I was accustomed. Sometimes it hurts getting there though. The corollary to this rule is the following: learn to wait tables. You will hone your social skills and make some easy cash. In the end those among you who are serious will work your asses off to make it happen. If you can’t wait tables you can always teach. More important artists than you can imagine spent their early years working as guards in world-class museums.
2. Kill your parents
While Sophocles teaches us that killing your parents is a far from productive endeavour, the same cannot be said within the world of culture. A younger generation should be willing and able to overturn the accepted canon, be it curatorial or aesthetic. You should also want my job and be doing everything that you can to get it one day. I would suggest refraining from the tactics of Eve Harrington in the film All About Eve (1950), or Elizabeth Berkeley’s character in Showgirls (1995). No pushing your elders down a flight of stairs please. Killing your parents is just an admonition to get your shit together and take over the world from the complacent generations that came before you.
3. You can learn more in the world than you can in school
I’m sorry if this is disappointing to hear for those of you who are spending tens of thousand of dollars on a graduate education. The point is: your years studying are a luxurious time to read, absorb, obsess, get jaded, experiment with hallucinogens, work on your Twitter feed and so on. However, after spending four years in college and seven on a doctorate and teaching, I learned more about art in one year working at the Walker Art Center than in any school. Working directly with art and artists in institutions is the real art world. Or in galleries. Or in a booth on the Venice boardwalk. Artists: get a job installing art. Art history or curatorial studies grads: beg, borrow, volunteer, or steal your way into a great contemporary art institution. Don’t be shy. Say you’ll do anything (but not in a creepy casting couch kind of way). You have no idea how much we need you but don’t know it yet.
4. Don’t wait for the ‘man’ to come to you
Take Damien Hirst’s first show. The now legendary ‘Freeze’ exhibition was a watershed moment in the emergence of an new generation of British artists in 1988. Hirst and his friends got someone to give them a warehouse space in south-east
London. They installed their work with a professionalism that belied their status as art students. They found a way to get the London art world’s movers and shakers to visit their exhibition and in so doing made
a small dent in art history. Make your own exhibition, start your own magazine, record or mime company. The end of this trajectory does not have to be multi-million dollar skulls encrusted with jewels.
I’m just saying, don’t wait for someone to hand you something.
5. Don’t spend more time networking than making work.
By networking I mean schmoozing, partying, getting in fashion magazines and so on. Cool does not make good work. Hard work makes good work. I recently asked an artist who I was working with whether he was going to take a holiday after our exhibition opened. He told me that he had always felt so fortunate that society allows him to make a living dreaming in his studio that he had a hard time imagining a traditional vacation. The best artists that I’ve ever worked with are so obsessed with their work that the studio is their home and their refuge. Make good work and the rest will come.
6. Have fun
If you’re not having fun doing what you’re doing don’t spend thousands on therapy to figure it out. Take a risk and follow another path. The time you have now is precious. Use it wisely.
7. Live wrong
Repeat this mantra: ‘If that’s wrong then I don’t want to be right.’ Don’t do what is expected of you, do what makes a difference. Ask more questions than you get answers. Plato suggested kicking the poets out of society in The Republic (c.360 bce) because they were too dangerous. There is far too little of the anger of the Sex Pistols, the absurdist outrage of Dada, or the devastating irony of writers like Thomas Pynchon around today. As the world falls apart around us we need young artists, curators, writers, filmmakers and musicians to illuminate our culture as we turn and twist in the widening gyre.
With fond affection while awaiting your act of patricide.
Update- Nothing like a shower to make the body and mind feel healthy….hmm without further ado.. more contradiction!!! I believe one should read a the blog post I wrote after reading the introduction to Michael Fried, it deals more with this matter.
Ariella Azoulay speaks of different types of images.
Phantom Pictures- Images placed into the psyche without any concrete, tangible perception- that is to say imagination/fantasy images…the Infinite.
Planted Pictures- Places of trauma both physical, tangible violence and the violence that is implied i.e. bombings/air-raid sirens.
Photography- is everything that the other types of pictures are not../extroverted
Photographs lack the intrinsic materiality of painting are reduced to semiology.
She is mainly dealing with photographs that are attempting to be the voice of the Homo Sacer, something I talked about in a previous blog, the non-citizens whom have no voice in the governed world.
Susan Sontag-Regarding the Pains of Others.
The rationing of horror, it is self-evident there are atrocities perpetrated by humanity yet it is because western do not exist within these realities that these images do not have any sort of affectation.
Again concerning the “cynics and disaffected” people whom are suspicious of the work of these photojournalists are nevertheless existing within the new reality that is America/western Europe and because of this to simply be suspicious is a matter of being besides oneself without receding into oneself for further mediation.
Another aspect, that of the sarajeavan/somalian juxtaposition, of this bad faith while the photographer felt it would be appropriate to show his two bodies of work of which he was proud of he has acted as only an extension of the west, someone whom could not empathize with these people; obviously there was the matter of the Bosnians being racist etc. yet to be objectified/dehumanized in such a manner is nevertheless a symptom of the west’s fall into Virtual Reality.
To place another analogy…Think of the radical groups whom make wild demands…socialization of structures/strong environmental legislation etc.. now what exactly would happen if the government had a strong consensus to their demands, that is to say would they be able to act on these demands or once the moment came to perpetrate their agenda, they had no way to do so…it is this symptom of Cultural Capitalism that exists today in our society.
It is this bad faith that allows for the sort of photograph that the civil contract talks about to exist.
Slavoj Žižek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here is the full transcript of his speech.
Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.
So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main street, not Wall street,” but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world
where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back.
They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.
They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go—but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?
We were called losers—but are the true losers not there on the Wall Street, and were they not bailed out by hundreds of billions of your money? You are called socialists—but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They will tell you that you don’t respect private property—but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if we were to be destroying it here night and day—just think of thousands of homes foreclosed…
We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990—and remember that Communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism (in China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for
the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—which are threatened by the system.
They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are merely witness how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down…
So is the change really possible? Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible,” we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is available to everyone (with the money…); we can enhance our physical and psychic abilities through interventions into the genome, right up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into a software program. On the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, we are bombarded all the time by a You cannot … engage in collective political acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate yourself from the global market, and so on. When austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. Maybe, the time has come to turn around these coordinates of what is possible and what is impossible; maybe, we cannot become immortal, but we can have more solidarity and healthcare?
In mid-April 2011, the media reported that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV and in theatres films which deal with time travel and alternate history, with the argument that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters—even the fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We in the liberal West do not need such an explicit prohibition: ideology exerts enough material power to prevent alternate history narratives being taken with a minimum of seriousness. It is easy for us to imagine the end of the world—see numerous apocalyptic films -, but not end of capitalism.
In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.” And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict—’war on terror,’ “democracy and freedom,’ ‘human rights,’ etc—are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.
I saw a sweet art piece on kim kim’s tumblr. check it out here.
Maybe I’ll have a new picture for you soon.. it’ll be from a 4×5 negative, this is kind of a big deal since I haven’t taken a picture in a while that I actually wanted to capture.
My guts are burning from coffee, and it is kind of terrifying not knowing where you’re going to sleep every night.
Here are some collages I have made, they are not for any specific class, just making them for the hell of it i suppose.
The purpose of this body of work is to create layers of imagery that will entrance the audience with the stylish verve of the commercial photograph while at the same time horrifying them. In this work, I use found images from the internet, those of which are not necessarily of the highest resolution creating a disintegration at the fundamental level. I aim to further this disintegration completely by continually compressing the images as jpegs as a result losing bits of data with every save of the file.
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