Author: wjacobr

Visual artist, poet, novelist, activist & Street Medic, living in North. Penn Name: Jacob Russell My blog is a confluence of art, writing, politics. my Art portfolio: Art-by-Willard.com

Making Art: The Multiplying Fractals of Uncertainty

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Have been feeling that I have a problem I need to solve, but I don’t know what the problem is. Too much like everything I turn my thoughts to. But it centers in my making art because that touches on everything else–all inclusive. Yet if ask myself, in what way or form, I come up blank because at the root of that part of the problem is the sense that making art is without any meaning or importance I can think of or articulate, multiplied by the conviction that this is in itself, unimportant and the making of art should be sufficient–but isn’t, because we live in such a fucked up world doing so much hurt to one another and our fellow creatures and anything close to ‘art for art’s sake,’ or as ‘personally sufficient therapy’, is so wrong, undermining the very generative source of the creative imagination–which leaves me with this compulsion to keep making art with no idea why or where it’s going or what it’s for, and believing that it’s not necessary to know that, and yet it is, very much so.
Something like that goes through my mind every time I finish a piece and ask–is this what I wanted? Did this piece answer the need I felt to make it, or did it fail that need? And of course, it always fails the need, so I have to sort what that failure consists of, which part is aesthetic, and which i can address in the next thing I take up, and which parts belong to this other multiplying fractal of of uncertainty I feel compelled to solve.

Is there a Capitalist Aesthetics?

In reading some of the essays and criticism on HYPERALERGIC, an idea began to form…  don’t know where to begin with it. I mean, the idea that there is an aesthetic force to capitalism that has been internalized, infusing and corrupting the machinery that guides artistic vision & produces art. I mean something more and other than marketing–how the utterly corrupted gallery to investor pipeline determines what and who will be recognized and rewarded, and who and what will be rejected. Yes, that’s a part of it–in as much as artists are influenced by their belief that this is the, or even ‘a,’ measure of success; I’m thinking of something deeper, placing capitalism in the operational place in the visionary machinery occupied by kitsch for Clement Greenberg. There was clearly something I was reacting to in Greenberg—his capitalist historicism–the idea of progress in art and how it serves to first exploit and than erase everything and everyone outside the privileged circle.

I’ll have to give this more thought.

Goby’s Journal: April 16, 2015. Post-Depression

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I’m not depressed now but I am deeply disturbed. I don’t know which is harder, living in this fucked up mess we’ve made for ourselves while depressed, where at least one’s subjective state seems of a piece with what is around us, or being of a ‘normal’ mind… or whatever you call it, and not having a clue how to reconcile the contradiction between feeling emotionally at home in the world, and yet profoundly alienated and out of sync. I walk down the street in Center City with a huge chip on my shoulder. I see business men in their Brooks Brothers suits and I want to punch them in their faces, knock the fucking iPhones from their soft puffy hands and stomp on them. I don’t know what to do with what I see–all these people going about their business with neither curiosity or awareness of anything or anyone outside the suffocatingly narrow closest of their self-constructed reality.
I sat on a wall in Love Park eating my falafel sandwich. Near by, a somewhat scruffy man dressed in black, suit jacket with tails, a stove pipe hat sat playing a violin. His case open for change. A man came by with a fancy camera and took his picture. He seemed to be looking for urban exotica. He turned and left. I wanted to run after him and shout in his face–if you’re gonna take pictures of street musicians for fucks sake, leave a dollar in their case! –but i couldn’t get the messy falafel wrapped up quickly enough and he disappeared. I told the violinist, he should put a sign in his case–that if you’re going to take photos, leave some damn change!. I gave him a dollar and bottle of water I’d gotten, but hadn’t opened yet.

Depression… and the Consolation of Philosophy

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The Consolation of Philosophy. I’m not a philosopher. But I like to think about stuff. I like to think about… about how to be able to find ways of understanding my personal, intimate, most subjective feelings/experiences… in such a way that I can fit them into a more inclusive meaning. Being one who is periodically subject (right word) to depression… interesting… was going to say, “significant depressions” … though ‘insignificance’ is more the root of their… whatever.
But this habit…compulsion, of writing about, and describing, and thinking about… has, while it has never made the depressions less miserable or shortened their duration… it has probably saved my life more than once. And late in my stay on the planet–helped to make them, again, while no less pleasant–something akin to the rhythm of waking and sleep… the depression being… what? A waking nightmare, that I know I will awake from.
Surfing the mind… the Big Wave can kill you. but you gotta do it. And you get better at it. And you never know…