Category: Art & Capitalism

Art and Revolution

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In a better world, there would be no need for artists to sign their work. Material support would not be tied to a competitive system, and confirmation would come from performing and making and doing, without the destructive, enervating conflict that comes from confusing satisfaction with one’s work with social approval and economic status. On that level, the distinction between craft and art would vanish—as the satisfaction that comes from work well done would fall equally to all who contribute to the benefit of the community. Art would not be a specialty of a few—but a gift nurtured and shared by everyone. Those more dedicated and gifted would serve to teach and empower others.

The capitalist systems of exclusion that corrupt the arts and those who are called to them—the gatekeeping function of galleries, critics, investors, and yes—schools of art, which combine to work from earliest childhood to destroy the seed of the imaginative impulse before it can germinate—which works to marginalize, impoverish or reduce to servitude all but the smallest number of those who survive the culling—having lost its economic and political purpose, would crumble and disappear.

Aroused from the drug of the Capitalist nightmare, every artist, poet, dancer, actor, musician… would be a revolutionary

What’s the alternative?

Sometimes I play with the idea–and it twists my mind–of being a “success” … in what that comes to in popular notions.

My worst nightmare!

To make stuff to entertain the rich and powerful, and worse–for them to use as investments.

THAT”S what “success” means for an artist.

What’s the alternative? I want people to see my work. I want to be appreciated for what I do. But the only way open to pursue that, is to make money, and of course, to do all the shit you have to do make that happen.. .which ends up… making stuff that entertains the rich and powerful–the ones who are fucking up this world and leading hell bent to species suicide, and worse… making art they can use to make even more money!

Better, give my work away. Or burn it.

Or make work they would love… but would leak poisons to melt their brains.

Oh… that I had that power.

Making Art is a Public Act

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Making art is a public act. The distinction between private and public art is false. As false as the capitalist idea of the private, autonomous individual. All art is public art.

I know that what I do—out of the deepest reserves of my being, appears, as I appear, as a distillation of the worlds of which I am made, of which I but a focal point—unique in my becoming, as each person is unique in their becoming—but does not, and could not exist apart and separate from that ecological fabric, any more than I could exist apart from my body.

The body of my being is not limited to this biological body (itself, a complex biome, a multiplicity of organisms, unique in its ever changing configurations), and is not a thing in a world of things, but a thing of that world of things, interfused with and never without them.

What I make, I make together–make unique, together. The fabric of the world of which I am a part comes together in my becoming, in the becoming of my art. A public act from the convergence of the world in and through my becoming.

The world I inhabit, and which lives through me—defines, controls, dominates—in its decadent, disintegrating, violent, suicidal late capitalist form. As an artist, I find no escape from the suffocating falsity, the ersatz poisonous lie that goes by the name of “success.” Showing in galleries. Selling to wealthy oligarchs for their private pleasures. I can reject all that, but it will shape me nonetheless, shape what I do, as much through its negative power as it would were I to embrace it. This is so, because there is no place in this world for art, except on its terms, in its control. Making art—being an artist, then, outside the systems and institutions that are that place, means living no place. No place to stand. Invisible, as one without public being.

You want to make this about money? …the problem of how to earn a living, how to support one’s art—and it certainly is that—but in a world where money, is not the means of existence, but existence itself (look at those living on the streets—how they do not exist in the eyes of passersby!)… in such a world, the problem of how to earn a living is but the surface—doesn’t come close to defining it.

One who rejects the false “success,” will come to understand that there is no other. That one has no alternative but to accept the unacceptable: to live and work as a failure. To make a failed art. An art that has no public being, because the public where it might exist, where the outsider artist might exist, doesn’t exist. Or doesn’t yet exist.

There is the romantic myth—of the individual who exists of and for his, or her, or their self alone. But that’s only another fabrication—a part of the capitalist lie. Because Making art is a public act. The distinction between private and public art is false. As false as the capitalist idea of the private, autonomous individual. All art is public art.

Goby’s Journal: 9/28/15 (2)

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Using journal entries as poems… or working them over as poems… integrating the quotidian and banal with … with what? With what happens listening to what the words evoke.
Have posted a few recently. Consistent with my moving away in 2010 from individual, stand alone poems, to adding one to another to make a cumulative series. This could become a 4th book. The first three have proved to be a hard sell. Even when sections of them get published… as individual poems. Never give up.

Every day a poem. Forms
on my desk
                  IMPORTANT INFORMATION!
have to renew my "benefits" Money poisons -- the seeds I plant bear
        Paper and paint. Unless -Converted- (is Capitalism a Religion? That I must 
convert to live?)
           
Fill out the forms!
                  indigestable
Here's what I want to write on the back of every piece of art I make 
and refuse to sell:

                In the Parcel -- Be the Merchant
                Of the Heavenly Grace --
                But reduce no Human Spirit -
                To Disgrace of Price --
                EmilyD

Artists as… tricksters of the real

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I came across this cleaning my room… from 2009: two years before OWS, and 3 years before I would begin making visual art again.

…poets and artists are the ultimate subversives. Not prophets and seers, as the Romantics thought, not hermetic guides blessing humanity with visionary truth, 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 Corporatocracy–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

—they…we… poke holes in the artifice that everyone might see, that the vision be not for the few, but for all.

The end is always a beginning

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Working on another painting in my PAVEMENT SERIES.

It’s what I see as I walk. Beneath my feet, the crust of civilization, broken, breaking up–color and life oozing from the cracks. Not so different from my trash assemblages. People seem mostly not to get it… the sidewalk and pavement pieces.

I don’t give a fuck. This is my best work

If We Are to Dream of Revolution, Let us Dream the Impossible

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What is work but acceptance of death? The contradiction is too great. Procreation, the work of survival, are but submission to the reality that we will not last and must pass on our dying to the next generation. And the next. And the next.
Survival—that robs us of the impossible, of the intensity of living that is our truest desire.

The contradiction is too great.

Look at those who are charged with ordering our lives for survival. The managers of survival. The Lords of Work. See how power accrues to them, and as it increases, reveals the master they serve, how more and more they are about Death’s work, till all our work paves the roads of war, genocide, and in the end—the suicide of our species.

What we cannot have, neither can we live without. In music, art, poetry—that which we cannot have, we can know, and not know; we can taste and feel and hear–if only in its absence–the impossible that is our true being.

It’s no accident, where utility and work and survival have become as gods, that the managers have become masters of war, that they rip music and art from our children, from our schools—that they turn artists into instruments of profit, turn art to their own ends–as propaganda, as anesthesia.

If we are to dream of revolution, let us dream the impossible—nothing less will set us free. Nothing less will restore us to our true Being.
—–
All that we have to do to sustain ourselves, denies us the Impossible Ecstatic Object of our desires. The paradox, that to sustain ourselves, we must reconcile ourselves to death and deny ourselves that which grants us the fullness of the illusion of immortality.
I’m perfectly serious when I say that the more power we have to sustain ourselves–which is, of course, power over nature, the more we (or those institutions and managers of sustaining power), become unconscious servants of death–possessed.
Their fear of the arts, and need to control and own them, the policing and punishment of erotic and ecstatic pleasures–these things are no accident. Economic, ideological and social theory are grossly inadequate to explain these historical patterns. Capitalism is itself less cause than symptom of deeper forces.

Doing Art

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Bed at 10:30. An odd sort of mood. Like being really agitated without being agitated. Blank. The emptiness of doing when all there is, is doing. Neither reward nor recognition, and such reward is reward for the wrong thing, and such recognition is nothing that matters. Not a bad state–it just is.
That fantasy of peddling a cart and never coming back… or going anywhere. But that’s where I am. What I’m doing. Not going anywhere. Standing in one place. Nothing moves or changes but the things I make, and if I stop I won’t exist. That’s the tricky part. Stop doing what? Only if it’s the right thing… the right doing. And no one can tell you what that is. And you can’t stop.
I glued and nailed to the stretchers of a canvas I’d primed: roofing. rusted mettle. shattered auto glass. Dirt. String. Art should show the world truly.
I need large needles with large eyes, large enough for some lovely, fine hemp cord I bought. I want to darn and sew stuff to a canvas.
Pointless. But do it because doing is all there is. Make and give the stuff away. Or paint over. Free art. Free. But it costs… everything.

Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of ARTMAKING

By David Bayles & Ted Orland: Santa Cruz, CA & Eugen, Or.  1994 – 2000

Picked this up at the Faerie Pot Luck. Only 118 pages, but have never read anything better on what goes into making art, for an artist. The motivations, the distracting temptations–what constitutes the only possible reward to keep at it, to keep doing it. I’m a 74 year old artist, and have gone through all the phases of despair, stopping, starting again. This book made me weep with joy. I don’t know that I found much new here, new for me, that is, at this stage in my life and my art, but the confirmation for what I’ve struggled with over so many decades is like a blessed cool rain after a long drought. Would that I had read this book… had it existed, when I was 24.

The reviews on Goodreads either thought it was 5 star (like me)… or didn’t get it. I’d be interested in what other’s who’ve read it have to say about it. Comments welcome.