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

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.

For Those of us Who Keep Journals

 Bridge over Outlet Bass Lake
photo by Will Hardin. Bass Lake Outlet
Journal entry
Vol. 44:
Friday
1/11/08
After 5576 pages (since 1987… earlier volumes destroyed), nothing could be clearer. My journals don’t aspires to “literature.” To be sure, there are moments–caught up in passing enthusiasms–whole volumes when plain insanity wears the mask of “art” –but day after day, page after page, what I’ve compiled is nothing more (or less) than a verbal equivalent of the middlebrow albums of the snapshots my family used to keep.

Moving pictures.

Like the reels and reels of 16 mm family movies–long since lost. Moments, images, brief visual narratives I hope to return to–and save from the ever changing sequences of organic memory. Something external, I tell myself. Like a photograph. Like those lost silent movies. No less subjectively framed, so no closer to “truth”, but at least–external. Free of alteration.

Vane hope. Every reader, and every reading… rewrites what is read. But at least, I tell myself, the words remain. There. In their original sequential order.

So many pages, so many words–an embarrassment of false memory, a presence that begins to weigh on my life (is that why I’ve burned ten-year segments–twice?… since my earliest entries… 50 years ago?)

Memory serves us to our advantage–only to the degree that we retain the power to transform it.
Anything less, is …?

If this is so for us as individuals… how much more is humanity burdened by the false memory of history?

If it’s our lot–condemned to misremembering, erasing the violence we have done, to ourselves, to our fellow creatures on this earth, let us begin to remember forward, to creatively body forth from imagination, a world where there will be no need to forget the horrors we seem unable to face in our past.

Not Quite There…lost… and not yet

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This sense of being at the end, and how, as an artist, I feel we have been wrenched loose from the idea of posterity that for so long was both a prison, and a liberating force in Euro-centered art.

Here’s a post from January, 2008.

In Hermann Broch’s novel, The Death of Virgil, the dying poet and the Emperor Augustus enter a prolonged dialog, an argument on statecraft and poetry, on duty, and–what is ultimately at stake here, the survival of the Aeneid. Their discussion turns on Virgil’s claim to the right to his own work, the right even to destroy if it does not fulfill what he believes to be his more profound duty to it, to the duty of art.

There is a mild earthquake in progress…

Without comment:

Caesar paced back and forth over the swaying floor; with every dip of the wave he turned round so that he was always walking up-hill; but now he must have reached the top for he stopped–yet maybe he did feel the Poseidonian movement–and held on to the candelabrum: “Again you speak of things that cannot be proved.”

“In art we are everywhere imitating the Greek forms, in the conduct of the state you are forging a new path. You are fulfilling the task of your time, not I.”

“That proves nothing; the newness of my path may be argued, but eternal form remains eternal forms.”

“Aye, Augustus, you simply do not want to see, you do not want it to be true, that the poetical task no longer exists.”

“No longer exists? No longer? You sound as though we were standing at the end of something…”

“Perhaps it would be better to say, not yet! for we may assume that a time for artistic tasks will dawn again.”

“No longer and not yet,” –Caesar, much dismayed, was weighing these words–“and between them yawns an empty space.”

Yes, no longer and not yet; that is how it sounded, how it had to sound, lost in nothingness, the lost, passed-away inter-realm of dream…

… isn’t this where we always find ourselves ?