Read article here –> Artsy Editorial
“When artists operate outside the gallery space, whether because their work functions best there, or because they are forced to, they are both creating valuable art and making the limitations of traditional art institutions visible—physically, historically, and conceptually. Perhaps such work can even change those institutions, those structures of looking. Perhaps it can change society at large. And that’s unceasingly relevant.”
I set up a table outside A-Space Anarchist Community Center. People ask, ‘how much is this?’ I say–if you like it, I’d appreciate a contribution so I can keep making art… it’s what you can afford. The value of art can’t be measured in money–only in love and appreciation. Make me an offer… and it’s yours.
At first people don’t take me seriously. Have to educate people to think outside Capitalism. Photo below, a section of weather-and-wear broken concrete near by. These textures are my inspiration. Some paint landscapes from a hill top. I find my art in a few square inches at my feet. Won’t this make a fine Silverpoint!
View GALLERY HERE.
For how long have I been saying this? The author sees the symptom but refuses to name the disease. Of course he does: he’s a part of the system! “But of course galleries need to make a profit….la la la ” The very structure of capitalism turns art into commodity and erases all other values. The whole damn system is rotten! Artists have to be creative in more than making art; we need turn our creative energy to imagining another reality, another world!
From ART NEWS, Go Pro: The Hyper-professionalism of the Emerging Artist, by BY
I’m convinced that drawing is the mother of all the visual arts, and while that usually entails, figure, landscape… representational work. I’m interested in working outside of those boundaries. What we’re trained to see–is too politically constrained, that artist’s renderings of ‘realism’ recapitulate and reinforce multiple levels of the status quo, & claim by default to being the one and only and forever reality. When the ‘IS,’ when what we have, our political status quo, is hell bent on the way to ending human life on this planet.
I’m thinking… how to explore different modes of drawing–life drawing, that don’t ‘draw’ on geometric space or figurative realism… yet are as intensely involved in that visual transformation from eye to paper as traditional techniques?
This is an aesthetic dimension of my interest in the place of art in late capitalism. How… is something I’m working out my art, rather than theory.
This speaks to my anarchist heart. Yes and yes and yes–oh, and so much more! (see my comment following this post, for how this connects with my art!
Agamben at one point choses to explicate this notion in reference to the included/excluded people within and outside politics:
It is as if what we call “people” were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve-court of miracles or camp-of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated.6Isn’t this the state of exception of migrant immigrants everywhere, a multiplicity outside the law, outside sovereignty, the inclusive excluded of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated?
And THIS:
“And in a different yet analogous way, today’s democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life. Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth.7”
And THIS is why NONE of the candidates, of either party, will move us one footstep beyond square zero!…is why not one of the U.S. presidential candidates, of any party, will move us one single step past ground zero!
…the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence.
– Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
When one actually thinks about it, rather than just spouting rhetoric from some ideological mythology of the Left or Right the problem of immigration in our world is about Sovereignty. It’s about the emerging war against boundaries, limits, and finitude in politics, science, philosophy, the arts, and gender. In politics it’s about immigration, migration, and the sense of breakdown of nations and their paranoiac reactionism against imaginary and perceived threats to their own integrity and sovereignty. Same in the sciences we see explorations emerging in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information and communications converging to form a global network society that will break free of political and social constraints and provide a larger framework and platform for such politically motivated notions as transhumanism that…
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This comes as a feeling that pressed to become a thought, or a thought that sought to become an image. I sketched a face in soluble ink. Efaced with watercolor. Still there. Subsummed
I seldom do figurative art. Not in my finished pieces. I draw the human figure… obsessively, from bones to flesh and back to bones–images of the human. But that isn’t what they are–the drawings. It isn’t there, the human, and in my finished work, what is human remains, not quite invisible, most often as little more than an unintended suggestion. Broken into fragments. Or traces and debris of our passing.
That isn’t a plan. I’m not rendering some idea I have… I don’t know what it is, other than it emerges from some primal conflict, deeply, inexorably personal. It permeates my art–how I work, how I think about it. I know that it has to do with how or why I spend so much of my private, internal conversation explaining, justifying–as though I stand before some perpetual tribunal–that has demanded, without asking (I just know)–that I’m called to account for what I make, for the very need I have to make art, in these conversations where I go endlessly back to the beginning. Do I even have a right to call it… art? To permit myself…?
How this is connected with using the human figure, I don’t know, but I know that it is. Had I all the years of a younger man ahead of me, I don’t think that a lifetime of analysis would be sufficient to uncover what lies buried, something powerful enough to have kept me away from the one thing I’ve always wanted to do–for almost 40 years.
But it’s more than personal… or should I say, more than my private demons. As though this most private struggle has reformed itself into the one subject central to everything I make. How I can feel human figures in the most abstract pieces that come from my hand. Has become their struggle. Something pressing to emerge, pressing toward freedom. Or is it the subsummation of the human back into that state from whence we came? My not distant death linking itself to the coming extinction of our species?
This is a post I left on Wet Canvas– a great resource if they confined themselves to technical questions, or were free from beholden to the status quo when posts ventured into more substantive questions about “Art” I think my welcome on this webpage is likely going to be short lived.
I know I have to tread carefully here. We have to live, to find a way to support our art. That’s a given. What’s not a given, is how we go about that, and–living in this Empire of Money and Death–what that means. And what it means to be dependent on utterly corrupted and corrupting gallery to investor pipeline.
There have to be other ways. Especially when you think of how that has come to define “success.” A form of success guarded by a system of gatekeepers, programed to exclude all but those deemed, first and foremost, most likely to produce work that will accrue in monetary value–as a commodity. Aesthetics comes in second.
How can one blame the gallery owners? They have to play the game–attract people with the money, the “investor class,” and are pressured to select artists they think will pass that test.
And for artists, the pressure begins with the first sales. What if they want to change course? To experiment? Bring something so unlike what has passed the market test that the gallery has no choice but to politely suggest they do more of … you know, what they’ve been doing.
Unless, for the very few, whose names have become the brand, the commodity.
All of which leaves art as entertainment for the oligarchy that’s won its wealth by exploiting workers, stealing the raw materials from “underdeveloped” nations, and by the profit of endless war. I mean really.. what does it mean to earn one’s living producing work to decorate corporate Human Resources waiting rooms… other than to have submitted to being nothing more than another something-less-than human resource?
Is art only to provide decor to the killer class? And ‘success’ reserved only for those who are willing slaves to their masters?
How do we defy the gatekeepers–all of them? The critics who are no more than servants to this same predatory system? Who have so successfully restricted women, blacks–anyone outside the presumed Western canon?
Capitalism destroys art. Capitalism corrupts and destroys artists. How do we find a way out of this?
Why can’t we pool or resources–draw on, encourage and help to develop the artistic aspirations of our communities? Create collectives where we can control how our art is used, and provide mutual support as we develop alternative ways to distribute our work, and alternative ways to support us?
I have a limited interest in arguing these issue, though I will be patient to explain them. What I would like, is to find artists who get it: who know that the whole “success” system is rigged (like the American USA election process), and any one artist, no matter how talented, has about as much chance of being one of the ‘winners’ as wining the lottery. And the effort to be one of those, means making oneself into a brand, and one’s art into a commodity. A total betrayal of everything that it means to make art.
The only existing alternative.. is… to go commercial.
I would prefer to give my work away to whoever wants it. I can’t. So I offer it on a sliding scale. Art that is only available to the privileged is a perversion. Thing is, can’t do this one by one. We have to create collectives, work together to create a wholly different mechanism. To become a part of the revolution. Cause if we can’t replace this late, zombie capitalist system… we are doomed to extinction. Cause they are hell bent on destroying as much life on this planet their power permits.
What are your thoughts? Again, I’m not into arguing this. If your only take is defending the status quo–pass go, go directly to EXIT. But if you have some inkling of what I’m saying here, and share my discomfort… maybe we have stuff we can talk about.
All the stuff from people two generations younger, on how much they got from Bowie and what the aging and passing of generations of pop stars born within a year or two of my own entrance to planet Earth, meant to them. Lennon, Dylan…et al.
I was born 1941, the day the Nazi’s invaded the USSR. I’m an artist filled to choking with debt to the past and no clue how to deal with it, but to use it for my own vision against the stream of recent history. 50’s rock of my teens broke down borders for me, I discovered, not David Bowie–who came way later when I was in my 30’s…but be-bop and cool jazz. The Beatles, the rock of the late 60’s and first couple of years of the 70’s were like movie soundtrack to my 20’s –while my own head was all Bach and Josquin du Pres and Palestrina and late 19th C, early 20th Modernists–artists both literary and visual. My overwhelming sense from all this is that, as an artist, I have no place in history, and not a sq mm of space free from it. I feel like a Lost Generation of One
Experts expect a ‘severe correction’, particularly in contemporary and American art, after years of spiraling prices and celebrity and luxury obsession
Art Market in ‘Mania’ Phase, from the Guardian. Including this report and all its links
For my other posts on Art & Capitalism, alternatives to the market/gallery system, click HERE and scroll down.
Revolution now!
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 