Category: Art & Capitalism

The Death of Art

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I wrote the following as a comment to a post on Levi Bryant’s Larval Subjects <TheWalkingDead>

This is something I’ve been trying to get my head around for a long time—what it means for an artist or poet to live in a  time without ‘posterity’. Hazlitt’s essay on Fame is the clearest statement I can think of for what we have lost. For Hazlitt, ‘fame’ was nothing like what that word has come to signify in popular usage, which is nothing more than contemporary notoriety; it was rather the consolation and hope for poets and artists unrecognized in their own time, who lived in obscurity, whose only reward was their investment in a belief that future generations will surely bestow on them the recognition they deserve, a belief that found support in the company of all the great artists and poets of the past. A kind of immortality akin to that of the Greek heroes of the Iliad. Even when this wasn’t as plainly articulated as it was with Hazlitt’s romantics, it has been present in one form or another, always—for as long as there been such a thing as Art. Walk through a museum. Thumb through the pages of a book on the history of art. Read Homer, or Shakespeare, or Cervantes. There would be your confirmation.

This is an idea that has a history older than history itself—drawing, before the written word, from oral traditions, stories and legends of the ancestors. But who can believe in such a thing now? –hiding in its pockets, as it does—its untenable teleological assumptions—some dreamt up culmination of the human story… or a future that has no end.

This is what the Death of God means to art, to the making of art. I feel this as something so immense, so important—that I’m a loss for how to think about it, how to express it. I suppose, for those who count success as material reward and notoriety, the very noise generated by of their misplaced desire is enough to mask the loss—but it doesn’t erase its effects. The noise of a Contemporary without a Present, exposes the truth… or the lie, as does the frantic, almost hysterical obsession with defending (even while erasing) ‘creativity’ –by demonstrating its usefulness, showing how it’s but another part of our blind collective frenzy to own control and commodify every last living cell and atomic particle in the accessible universe… what are these, but replacements for the old, dead transcendence with which we wrapped– and called upon to justify the erotic jouissance of our childish play–all that we have left now, of what we used to call “Art”? Because Art doesn’t exist without that false transcendence, without what was purchased with that belief in posterity and all that it assumed.

Art is as Dead as God.

And after the fear, the feeling of something precious lost—comes a sense of tremendous relief… terrifying in its own way… but relief! There is no one watching from above… no unborn critics holding our future hostage, waiting in eternally suspended judgment the works of our imagination… where we once had ART… what we have now – is but play, a joyful play that preserves us—for however long or short our stay on this transient planet, in a childhood we need never grow up or out of.

Goby’s Journal, July 13, 2015

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Cat on my desk beside me, head on my arm. Somethin been working on my mind… just under the surface. Can feel the ripples but don’t know what kinda fish is stirring the waters.
Finished a new piece–first this month.

Making art is something that just happens. It’s all the ways the making and then what’s been made is connected to the rest of the human world that’s difficult and confusing and dangerous. And it is connected. Doesn’t come from within like from a well apart from everything else… the well itself, the waters you draw from it, are fed by countless springs, and it won’t do just to let the pieces sit there. Artists avoid dealing with that, or rather, think that they’re dealing with it by entering the market game, the selling and promoting and galleries and all that shit, even to believing that’s how you know you’re doing it right–even though they say something else. Just about how to make a living, they say, pretending that they haven’t sold themselves to the machine, the fucking empire of money and death just by accepting the idea that that’s what you have to do.

But that’s not what’s been on my mind. Or only a piece of it. I light incense. I have really good incense. I put a piece of window screen over a jar with a candle, and put some pieces on the screen over the flame. Because it involves my body, my senses–without thinking about it. The fragrance. The candle light flickering on the wall and ceiling.

But those fish, or whatever they are… swirls on the surface of the pond. It’s time to sleep. To take this up in dreams.

from The Margins: “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show”

Ken Chen’s, essay.

I read this, at first, racing through out of excietment for what I was finding… but had to stop. To begin again, more slowly. Some–much of this was painful, in a multiplicity of ways–where do I come from, afterall, if not from the colonizers? It took me almost two hours. I need to read this again.

JUNE 11, 2015 | AVANT-GARDE, CONCEPTUAL POETRY, KENNETH GOLDSMITH, POETRY, RACISM, VANESSA PLACE

From Whitman to Ferlingetti, a word to the Defenders of the Indefensible

When an artist’s ‘flaws’ are more than personal, but go to the very heart of the social and political miliue that we support with every penny we spend, we get no pass to excuse the person because of “the times,” or because their faults are endemic to the system. Doing so is but a way to excuse ourselves from our own complicity, and from making action to overthrow and replace this racist, misogistist empire of money and death, the centerpiece of our lives and our art.

A response to CA Conrad’s Harriet Essay on Whitman

CA Conrad wrote an important essay on Harriet. One that no one should ignore, or dismiss, or shy away from because it offends. It has pushed my own thinking on art, poetry, revolution, and I would ask that anyone reading this… take a deep breath, step back, and let it work on you—in the context of our received notions of where we have come from.

I have always thought that the strongest works of the imagination were more and other than the intentions of their makers, or of the interpretative constraints of their times. I haven’t changed those beliefs. But Conrad’s challenge is not about that. Defenses of Whitman—that he was a man of his times, that he wrote equally strong passages sympathetic to slaves (if not of native peoples)—are beside the point. What I heard in his essay was an echo of something that has been on my mind for some time.

We want to ignore, or explain away, the complicity of our cultural heritage—I mean, white, Euro-American art, poetry, music, theater, how it has served, directly and indirectly, the Masters of our history. And their wars, their slave holding, their misogyny—kings and empire, and after, the economic empires of colonizing capitalism.

It isn’t enough … or maybe, it’s not yet time, to save what has been passed down, what we (as artists… of all forms), are meant to follow, to renew, to challenge even as we stand on the shoulders of those who we must acknowledge—that we are their heirs. But what, and how much, of what they have left us?

The analogy that comes to mind… the German children and grandchildren of the Nazis. We are the children and grandchildren—and more than that, the brothers and sisters of genocide, of this whole monstrous empire of money and death, and what we have been given—our aesthetic heritage– to build on—is infected beyond our… if not, of future generations… ability to purge and cleanse.

We cannot cannot cannot build a new world, and nothing less will do if we as a species—if life on this planet is to survive– than to build a new world, and we cannot do that but on the ashes and ruins of the old.

This is Conrad’s hard truth.

There may come a time when we will be able to look back, read Whitman for what even he had no inkling of what was there, to find and celebrate again that lightning of imaginative truth, the light of which illuminates the truth neither person nor historical time were able to see. I do not despair of the power of imagination—that whatever come forth from that sublime flash, will endure, and be worthy of our appreciation generation to generation. Whitman, too.

But we are not in that place where we can rescue what flashed through him—not before we are ready to confront the truth of the contamination of Empire and the myth of race and the destiny of State.

I stand with you, Conrad. For your courage, and your truth.

And hope for the day, when we have remade this world—when we will again be able to recite Whitman… and all our failed poets, artists… as we may be remembered… for all our failings.

An artist’s manifesto

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Up from the basement studio–preparing a block for a woodcut, and began a painting that will be 20 in my Pavement series. I may do this to the end of my days. I see years of possibilities in this–and the metaphor of broken foundations is exactly where my head has been. Who knows what may grow out of the cracks–what we can build from the rubble.
All our high culture (especially “high culture”)–white Euro-American, grew in the service of kingship, empire, and from there–slavery, war, capitalist economic colonialism and expansion to the end of life on the planet. What is there to do, but renounce it–all of it. Build a new world from the ruins.

Tell us, Chris Hedges, What will be the course of this Revolution?

Chris Hedges on Salon

Question is… can we do the revolution, like digging under the foundation, and as the Empire collapses, a little here, a little there, replace it with what we’ve been working to build together, like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, plank by plank–and at last, transformed into something unimaginable until it emerges, whole and free of the empire of money and death that had engendered it? Or must it come from a bloodbath, where force will replace force, and the boot of Authority emerge, unchanged, but with new names, and new victims, and our new masters?

Which will it be? And do we even have a choice?

A Classic Drawing Book: Everything is Political!

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You can find telling social information in places where you might not expect it–though for Andrew Loomis, who worked as a commercial artist, it shouldn’t be surprising. I downloaded a PDF of his Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth–first published in the 30’s, out of curiosity, because I remembered it from my uncle–who also was a comercial artist, and whose drawing always bore the mark of that style.
What struck me as I read the text and looked at these highly idealized figures, was how uncritically this was presented. No indication of awareness of the social and political impact–the unrealistically idealized figures, in proportion–their nordic whiteness, the not entirely implicit marginalization and exclusion of anything outside of those lines. One comparitive set of figures is partiularly telling. From the “heroic” 9 1/2 head tall figure on the right, to the 8 1/2 head ‘fashion’ figure, the “normal-ideal” 8 head figure, standard for comerical art, to the 7 1/2 head figure on the left (naturally), described as unpleasently “squat” and not suited for or acceptable for commerical work–drawn with a droopy, black mustache–the undesirable southern or eastern European. It goes without saying, there were no black bodies, or Asian faces.
Again, what struck me was the absolute silence, the total absense of any critical understanding of the role played out here in comodifiying certain bodies and devaluing others, it’s racism–all that it was teaching besides how to draw (some types of) human figures.
A drawing book from Reagon’s mythical White America.

What would a Free University look like?

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Years ago I lived in a communal house. Expenses were divided proportional to income. For those willing to to do this, a house or loft space with 6 to 8 people (more would be better), would free people with those academic skills our late zombie capitalism continues to marganialize (the better to control and confine what is taught to ‘productive’ job training)– to teach and mentor, especially in the arts (the most inclusive definition of what that means) as alternatives to preditory graduate programs designed as institutional income generators.

We need to seriously think about, plan and experiment with education outside the academy– for all the humanities, creating non-hiarchal, student participatory teaching models and measures of competence as alternatives to grades and degrees,  not modeled on existing institutions, but freely drawing on their rescources, becomeing predatory parasites of the predatorys at the top of the educational food chain.

This is not a utopian idea–this is what MUST be done if education in other than science and business is to survive outside the jaws of our corporate masters into the rest of this century. Whatever the personal sacrifices requiered (which more and more, means giving up nothing but the illusion of tenure and financial security), this is the cost of creative and intellectual freedom. It’s time and past tiime to renew the idea of the “free university,” not one modeled on existing institutions, but as decribed here–aa living cooperative communities.  It’s time and past tiime to renew the idea of the “free university,” not one modeled on existing institutions, but as decribed here–aa living cooperative communities.

Mahler and Freud

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There was a meeting between Freud and Gustav Mahler in Leyden. We know little of what happened between them, but that it had something to do with a crises in Mahler’s relationship with Alma. And that he was reconciled (for a time), with Alma, and wrote no new music after.

There is the angel-whore thing for women. And the fool or genus thing for artists. Or there used to be. For those of my generation, artists will understand how the two are related—though women had only the option of afflicting themselves with the former—excluded from the latter.

I’m speaking of artists with high aspirations. I don’t know if that exists now, at least not in the same nativity as it once did, as though aspirations of the highest order transcended economics and politics and class… and gender. I come from that generation.

And I am torn asunder by the conflicts between what I’ve inherited, and don’t know how to handle or transform, and what I’ve come to know and understand about the dependency of most, if not all, of what those aspirations and what they meant, on the economic and political forces that largely shaped and almost entirely controlled how they played out in the real world.

One version of the Mahler and Freud and Alma story, is that he gave up, or got over, or whatever… the neurosis that was the cause of his sexual impotency… but also, the source of his musical creativity.

I don’t know that younger artists think this way—or can imagine such a conflict. Though I think it still exists, but in an emergent form I don’t understand. I mean—the drive to make art, and to more than that, to make it MEAN something…even if you have no clue that is, or how to do it…other than following some inappeasable inner guide. That. Will. Not. Let. You. Go!

The angel and the whore. Everyone has the capacity to make art. And in any world I would want to live in, that would happen. No one should be denied the opportunity, the exposure to the art of the past—from all cultures and traditions! So I don’t stand in judgment. There can be no just gatekeepers in this utterly corrupted capitalist, colonialist world.

But is everyone afflicted by this … “aspiration?” Is it no more than market ambition, in the guise of a wish for an impossible posterity? Or momentary “fame?” … better called, notoriety? Or only those of my generation… still infected with something we can’t possibly describe or understand in these new conditions?

All I can say is… I would never give up whatever craziness or neurosis I’m burdened with, no matter what inflictions that might entail—if it meant, no longer being able to make art. Poetry. Literature.

Alma can find someone else to fuck.