Month: February 2015

Poetry & Art on the Brink of Extinction

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from December, 2009… waiting for the end. When OWS came along two years later… I was ready.

I had this feeling once before, on the third or fourth day of the Cuban missile crisis, standing outside the door of a nearly empty auditorium on the Campus of Wichita State University, listening to a member of the faculty playing a Bach partita for unaccompanied violin. This time, it doesn’t go away. It comes over me every time I look up at the sky.
Below is a comment I tried to leave to a post on pas au-delà, but there seemed to be a problem with the system. As it’s something I think about every time I hear someone complain about Obama’s failure, I’ll post it here. But pay a visit to Matt’s blog–and buy someone you love one of his beautifully crafted cutting boards for Xmas.

We need a revolution… but of what kind?

The problem with blaming Obama is it suggests that, whatever it is that’s wrong, the right individual in the right place, is going to be able to make it different. Even if there were truth to the cliché that the American president is the ‘most powerful man in the world,’ his power is still limited to stirring the soup; he can’t cook up a new reality. His power is borrowed–it belongs to the whole vastly complicated network that created the mess in the first place.

No president is going to start a revolution, and nothing short of revolutionary change is going to get us out of this. I say ‘revolution,’ because I can’t think of a better word–I sure don’t have in mind any historical example I can think of. Not going to help to turn the pie upside down, put the one’s on the bottom on top, but same old pie. And it’s not going to come from the top down. Before power corrupts, it blinds. Even the prospect of destroying all life on the planet isn’t enough to penetrate the belief of those used to having their way, the belief that they are in control, that whatever comes, they–if no one else, will be able to tough it out, to survive and prosper.

I don’t have a picture of how that ‘change we need’ is going to happen, but I’m damn sure it’s gotta be big… bigger than the industrial revolution, bigger than the emergence of nation states… something equal to the neolithic agricultural revolution, the beginning of settled urban life and our invention of the gods. In a way, our imaginations are still dominated by that vision–whether or not we hold to any of the great mythical systems that grew out of it. What we need is nothing short of starting over, of building anew from the ruins… (is this, perhaps, the ultimate challenge to artistic vision…?) trouble is, I don’t think we’re going to have a second chance. We have turned ourselves into collective infants–a two year old–who out of terror and anger at the failure of the gods we invented to define and lead us, are about to destroy everything in a final uncontrollable tantrum.

Art and Capitalism: There has to be a better way

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The first time I visited the Ox, late Spring of 2012, to see police films of our arrest at Wells Fargo, I knew, standing on the roof and looking across the vacant lot, the warehouse and brickscape, the Frankford El like a toy train in the distance, that this was the place where I would begin to make art again.

An unfinished, unheated warehouse, home to a collective of not quite 20 activists, queers, musicians, artists… and a soon to be grad student in particle physics who slept on top of what had been an elevator shaft that opened to the roof—here, I thought, there would be space and freedom to work, a return to where I left off some 40 years before.

The streets around the Ox were a rich source of materials, broken glass, rusted metal, torn sheets of roofing, weathered composition board, scraps of wood, cardboard. I had long been fascinated by found things—patterns, colors, forms of abandoned objects, invisible to those who passed them by without seeing. I began to drag in trash from the street, spread pieces out on an old dining room table, arranging them, observing how they came together to form new objects that freed them from their past identities as objects of use, from their place in the capitalist Empire of Money and Death.
I had no pigments, no brushes, only rusted nails and screws from the street, wire and string to tie things together, planks of wood or Masonite I would find to mount them on. I went to Utrecht and asked the art student clerk: what would could I use to bind such a diversity of materials—that would dry transparent, remain flexible to hold objects that would expand and contract at different rates in reaction to heat and cold? That’s was how I discovered Modpodge!

Here was a way of making art without grants or institutional support. Art from the streets—literally. Those great pieces of public art, I thought—cast bronze, welded steel beams, no matter how pleasing—what were they, but bound slaves, there to decorate and embellish the institutions of power, useful propaganda. You see! they proclaimed, this is civilization! Without the generosity of the predator class, where we would be? How would it be possible to have art like this? What public art has always done, these monuments of beauty and culture!—the equestrian statues of generals, heroes of conquest, genocide and patriarchal tyranny—no matter that they had been replaced by elegant abstractions, perfect representations of faceless corporate power. Art in chains. Artists as servants of the corporate police state.

I bought brushes. An easel. Pigments. Added color to my assemblages, worked on recovering my drawing skills. Began to make paintings. I had a show at a little gallery in Port Richmond—and put prices on my work.

It felt dirty. Wrong.

Where was this taking me? What was the logical path for this? O.U.R. Gallery, was not dependent on sales, but if I wanted to sell, if I had been a young artist hoping someday to live from their art, that was the route I’d have to take—assemble a fine expensive portfolio of photographs, find galleries that would take my pieces, give me shows–galleries that did depend on sales, and on buyers whose interest in art was for investment, or the prestige of owning—owning work that might someday be coveted by collectors, that would decorate the walls of the wealthy, that might one day hang in museums—the mausoleums that house the remains of dead creators–the artist’s dream-equivalent to winning the lottery. Or the field slave whose highest hope is to work in the house of the master. For those who make it, become part of a system of oppression that forces all but the very few to live by commercializing their skills, or find other means to support themselves and their work, a system of exclusion that has little or nothing to do with aesthetic merit. The artist: submissive servant of the Empire.

There has to be a better way. Capitalism, like abusive relationships, traps by maintaining the illusion that nothing else does, or can exist. Take your lumps, it’s all there is. And maybe—maybe you’ll be one in a million… or billion, who is selected for the dubious honor of rubbing elbows with the predators, thieves and killers who manage the levers of power.

Think about it.

Of related interest, Picasso’s granddaughter scaring the shit out of Big Dealers by threatening to sell his stored up work.

STOP SELLING OUR ART!

CapitalismIsDemocracy

Really, this article says it all:

Selling my art isn’t capitalism, as I own the means of production. I understand that. I’ve read Capital.
What I want to opt out of is the gallery to investor pipe line. Galleries, even when run with the highest ideals, are dependent for survival on buyers (duh)… and that pool of buyers is heavily influenced by those who buy for investment, as well as aesthetics–even though though it may often be too deeply entangled to tell one from the other. What is inescapable, though, is that this functions as a systemic market gatekeeper on what art, and which artists, reach a public larger enough to come close to supporting them, so over all, you have the art that works it’s way up, and the very very few artists who are able to be fully supported by their work, without going openly commercial, and this is market driven–and more important–market excluding, so truly good work, often the best of what’s being made, has no place, and will never find a place until it’s no longer contemporary (and so, non-threatening). So what we’re left with are artists who think they can play the system, competing for a very few seats at the top, with aesthetic value playing an incidental role at best. It becomes a game where those who control what is seen, are the capitalist predators, with full power to censor and exclude what can’t be usurped and used to for profit or propaganda… or later, with sufficient bribes, or outright theft… as commercials.

I want to use how I distribute my art to support a message about the idea of ownership as understood in a capitalist system. As for the right to support myself–the only way that can happen, as things stand now, is by entering into the gallery to investor game. No. No way. What I want to do is create an alternative–and that means,  directly challenging it, not imitating it by other other means. It’s also not something I can do alone. I need other artists, to work together, to work out how to do this, collectively, through horizontal, creative decision making.

There’s going to be, I hope, a discussion around this at A-Space here in Philly some time in the near future. Maybe if your around, you can come.
If you didn’t read the article linked at the head of this post–do it now.

Tricksters of the Real

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from December, 2009/ Journal/ Barking Dog

I search for poets and artists who are the ultimate subversives. Not prophets and seers, not hermetic guides blessing humanity with visionary truth, certainly not enterainment or comfort for the powerful–but tricksters of the real,

Marxists …
of Night at the Opera, destroyers of painted sets ripping away the masks of power, tearing down the curtains of the Corpratocracy–all that makes it possible to believe in the American Hologram–the artifice of the military/industrial/prison complex. By using the stuff of our collective illusions as raw material for… play,

for delight,
for life

I think again of the painters of the cave walls… how there must have already been present some experience of alienation—of dissonance between the encounters of the hunt, and what that meant to them for their survival—imaginatively, intellectually (yes, intellectually!) — some terrific gap those images were fashioned to reconcile, to bridge. Not so unlike us, for Isn’t part of the message of those images… the wonderfully rendered figures of bison, elk, bears and … in contrast, the questionable status of those human stick figures who so uncomfortably inhabit the same space, as though belonging to a different reality.

The one we are still waiting to create.

Reading at the Bride: a tribute and thanks to CA Conrad

I went to a reading at the Painted Bride on Thursday. A time for remembering. For reflection. I shared a reading at the Bride in — 1966? –with the late Henry Braun. That was when the Bride was on South Street–Gerry Givnish had recently opened a gallery in what had been bridal store–hence, the name.

I was 25–a very young 25. I don’t know how I got that reading spot–it was in this bare store front space, fold up chairs. Paintings on the wall. Don’t remember if it was before or after–but I brought some of my paintings–an open invitation for artists they thought might fit their vision. I didn’t. My paintings didn’t (large oils of faces–filled the canvas–somewhat expressionist mode). I think I looked way too straight and middle class to fit in, and my paintings too over the top for their more “cool” ironic aesthetic…Philly Warhol school.

Before the reading Thursday, I took in the paintings in the gallery. Remembered. How nice, I thought–that this had come from that. A poetry reading in a gallery, surrounded by art.

Such a beautiful reading –with CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock. Not only are they both great poets, but they have exemplified with their generosity and support of poets in Philly and beyond, something as important as the poetry itself. An idea of poetry that has rejected competition, exclusion, the musical chairs of who will survive, who rise to the top–that whole fucking capitalist Darwinian struggle, refereed by literary gatekeepers. They stand for another world, another way of living and loving, the world that we dream might be. This is the poetry of the extraordinary family that I’ve come to be a part of, and I feel so fucking lucky to have lived long enough to experience and share.
I felt this deep sense of affirmation as they read–that we are committed– together– in our poems and our lives, to making a better world, to supporting one another, to a creative struggle of imagination and compassion against indifference, cruelty and submission to the lordship of money and power.

I wanted to voice my appreciation here, and my amazement, at finding myself at such a time and place, in being able to be part of this unfolding creative family.

Thank you CA Conrad, Frank Sherlock… and all the wonderful Philly poets who have informed, and transformed my life.  I love you… all of you.

Surrealism War & Language

from December, 2009

A person walks down a city street. Everything seen, heard or felt is passed through the language appropriating, symbol generating and sorting process of the mind–some of this conscious, much of it not. The very act of naming things and events as they move through the perceptual field is a form of continual classification, assigning every ‘name’ its place in relation to the imaginative hologram (mis)taken for ‘reality.’ Nothing is encountered as raw material. Everything has already been ‘cooked,’ manufactured and set in motion as a part in that world–fabricated to perpetuate a self-generating cultural process… what, with a completely unjustified lack of irony… we reorganize and narrate afterwards as ‘history.’
A quote from Barrett Watten’s War=Language.

The critique of the language is the first place to begin to attempt remove the veil to perception that has been imposed on us and to see things as they are. Pseudo-rationality based on lack of evidence or supporting argument: “It is difficult to conceive the volume of supplies required for a large combat force or the difficulty of delivering them where they are needed in a timely fashion.” We need to take the mechanized hardware of the language of war apart—by locating alternate evidence in multiple media, by questioning the pseudo-objectivity of its delusional conclusions, by unpacking its embedded metaphors and narrative frames, by thinking otherwise. [ … ]To dismantle this war, in its causes and consequences, we must begin with language itself.

Read at a Day of Reflection on the War on Iraq, Wayne State University, 26 March 2003.

The problem isn’t confined to language about war–and I imagiine Watten would agree; but to the whole language constructed cultural universe within which war is but one set. Deconstructing the distortions of propaganda is like trying to rid the house of an investation of roaches by stepping on the ones you can see; they will just go on breeding behind the walls. The language of war is not generated by a misuse of language about war; the misuse of language about war is a reactive need to hide the more obvious deficiencies of the whole self-generating network of economic, political, social (read, CLASS) activities by which we sustain ourselves. We overvalue the symbolic if we ignore the way the habitual structures of economic and social life become themselves both generators of those symbolic representions requiered to sustain them (neoliberal ideology), and active conditioners appropriating for its service all language and symbols felt to be alien to its aims.

This is why reason and evidence–when used to critique and expose the fundamental presuppositions of the culture, and even more, when perceived to attack or alter habitual structures of activity, have so little impact. The harshest, the most rigorous critique, as long as the object of the critique retains the appearance of its culturally constructed representation, is merely reinterpreted in terms which support the continuing adaptive evolution of the system.

To return to Watten’s assertion that “To dismantle this war, in its causes and consequences, we must begin with language itself;” besides broadening the concern to encompass, not only war, but the whole destructive historical, cultural cul-de-sac we’ve been heading down, I would add that we must begin below the level of language–that before we can alter the constructions, we must come as close as possible to reducing them again to raw materials… that is, by learning, or relearning… how to play.
Play is not recreation… it is re-creation. We cannot magically wish away the symbolic configurations of our received world, stripping away the names with which we dress our perceptions. But we can play with them, and in play, serious or whimsical, named things regain their plasticity, loosen their attachments to the assigned order. In a sense, what is most fulfilling in any human relationship–friendship, love, the companionship of work–is a kind of play, unfixing the other from the conditioned; if there is any meaning to ‘freedom,’ it would be this. In language, too–we can either rehab the old structures, repairing and rebuilding–or make new. And yes, we can ‘make new,’ by unfixing the parts, razing the building, turning bricks to clay and glass to sand and fire. When poets pry loose the joints of syntax, and novelists refuse to follow the established maps of narrative–this too, is play, play that makes us free, and while poets cannot themselves remake a better world, they can make it easier to imagine how it might be done by unlocking our vision from the received conditions of the terrible hologram, this script we’ve been following to our untimely end. I see this as an endorsement of both the surrealist project(s) of the last century, though not neccesarily of (their take on them) the psychoanalytic theories they used to defend it), and of poetic movements like LangPo and Flarf–and of the least entertainment driven Rapp and Performance poets (Ursula Rucker) “I didn’t come here to make you feel good… “). Less than that–and we, as poets and artists, will again and again find ourselves, against every intention, having our work, at best, serve to comfort and reinforce believers in the Hologram… and at worst, transformed into propaganda to fuel the endless cycle of war and economic exploitation.