Stuff on the web is forever. I lost the files with most of the photos of work made before 2016. Typing up journal entries from our Wells Fargo trial, there was mention of a paining I did soon after: the broken nosed 3 foot (My Master’s Voice RCA dog that I used as a model at the Ox. I stuck torn up pieces of the subpoena’s from the trial to that piece, and called it Subpoena Dog. I gave it as a gift, so couldn’t take another photo of it… but when I Googled, Subpoena Dog Willard Art–there it was! #133, from March, 2013. 32×22, Acrylic on Masonite–the rough side.
Category: Art & Capitalism
Assata No. 8
#939 I will do these on order.
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.
Work in Progress
The mothers milk of the State is the Blood of Martyrs 36×27
#86 When the Morning Stars…
…Threw Down their Spears
40″ x 24″ Cardboard, string, dirt, wood, acrylic on Masonite. Another early piece, from December of 2012. This was a leap forward in gaining confidence in what I was doing.
View more work at Saatchi Art, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.
#897 Assata 2 in the series
Some variation in wording. I’ve gone with what I’ve heard on the street–Assata Shakur’s words come alive in the throats of comrades, rather than searching for the “authentic” dead letter original.
Reading Motion of Light on Water
Just finished Samuel R. Delaney’s The Motion of Light on Water: Sex and Science Fiction. Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965.
Will take me a long time to find words… I can’t remember a book that touched me, took hold of me like this… wrenched me, wrung me out.
I was born in 1941, Delaney in ’42. I was a child and came of age in the Midwest: Chicago, Kansas City, summers in east central Michigan. Delaney, in NYC. So very different–but so much of the external social climate of a childhood in post war America, the 40’s and 50’s–so much, the same. What we shared, was the bloody sword that slices the body from desire–that creates what he called “the split subject”…
” … the space between the two columns (one resplendent and lucid with writings of legitimacy the other dark and hollow with the voices of the illegitimate)–that constitutes the subject, it is only after the Romantic inflation of the private into the subjective that such a split can even be located.”
Like Delaney, I was looking to art and writing to negotiate the chasm, but shaking off the dressing of ‘legitimacy’ was so much harder, took so much longer–the weight of the Midwest was suffocating, and sex was at the center of it, the poisoning of desire that makes the body itself an empty vessel, spiritually empty, trying to belong to something utterly alien to me, and failing and failing and failing…an impoverishment of that spirit–which is the life of the body.
It can’t be a coincidence, that I returned to making art after 40 years, at the same time that I was able to embrace sexual desires that had been latent, but buried …. for at least that long. It’s no good being coy! Name them. You have to name them, Delaney says. If fucking is good — so is sucking cocks! Or wherever else you body wants to take you!
Forty years — that should have been a wilderness — not a desert, but a rain forest paved over. Like weeds in the cracks of concrete, something kept pushing through, pushing out into the light. Forty years…
… so many lost lives, so much damage, so many scars.
——
As I clicked to post this… it came to me, that I have a whole series of paintings and drawings of broken concrete… how the psyche seeks to find bodily expression. You do these things, and don’t know why.
Philadelphia Orchestra Goes to Hell
No one could have greater regard for the value, and necessary autonomy of creative work, than me, but art doesn’t exist outside of political reality, and an artist, of whatever medium, who disregards how their work is employed, will be themselves complicit in the uses to which their work is put.
Yes, I’m thinking about the musicians in the Philadelphia Orchestra–who go to Israel to bath in the blood of murdered Palestinian children.
This is so terribly troubling for me, because I hold the music they serve, and all of the arts, in such high regard.
Because they have refused to accept their own agency, and allowed the machinery of economic “necessity” to determine what they will, and will not do, they defile the art they are devoted to, and themselves with it.
Better there be no Great Philharmonic. Better they ply their trade busking on the street. Better shut down the monstrous Kimmel Center–temple of money and poisoner of art and artists. The more money it takes the make a work of art, or performance, the greater the pollution.
In this world, the best artists will perform for the people, make their art from trash on the street.
Capitalism defiles everything
Nothing can remain Sacred in this world, until we cleanse it of the disease of Capitalism.
Artists against Capitalism!
Why is it so hard to find committed, radical/anarchist artists–committed, both to making art, AND to working together to find ways to make art outside the capitalist, gatekeeper, gallery to investor system? Cause no one can do this alone.
One of the factors in what makes me so discouraged, and depressed in my efforts to make art.
It can’t be just talk. It has to be action–discovering, creating through action. It has to begin with saying: we can’t do this anymore! We can’t work within the system anymore! Enough!
And then–looking at what we CAN do–and doing it!
Though the material and social problems involved are unique to each medium and form–this is something that should be addressed by artists of all kinds–dancers, theater people, poets, musicians –together, as a collectivist work.
#838
11″x 15″ watercolor, pen & ink. On Fabriano 140lb coldpress. Yellow-orange, blue-violet, yellow-greet triad.
Art is a rupture in the established order; a work of art is a tear in the net we cast over the perceived world– while the ‘Art World,’ in the guise of celebrating the rupture, works tirelessly to stitch it back in place. The Art World uses a capitalist idea of success to train artists to heel, like dogs on tight leash.
There is nothing more anti-art, than the capitalist Art World.
View more work at SaatchieArt, and on my web portfolio: ART BY WILLARD For photos on this blog, click MY ART on the right panel and scroll down.
Artists are not BRANDS!
Bend over, artists, bare your butts and smile to the sizzle of the Branding Iron!
This is everything that’s wrong with the “Art World.” This abominable piece… empty of irony or insight.
” To start, it is all about thinking differently. You are not just an artist. You are an artistic entrepreneur and your art is your big business. As CEO, it’s time to take a note or two from the owner’s playbook of art business and marketing on developing your brand identity.”The other thing I object to in that ad/fomercial, is the message that if you follow those tips, you too, can become a ‘successful’ artist-CEO; that is precisely analogous to advising poor people, that if they work hard, follow the rules, and stop drinking coffee, they won’t be poor, when the reality is, that the system CREATES poverty, and prevents it’s elimination to insure a ready supply of low wage labor, just as the system PREVENTS all but a very few artists from becoming self-supporting, and then, at the cost of their creative freedom for most of those who do get that far. So the promise offered in that piece, is a lie–bait for those whose need to believe exceeds their desire to see through the sham.
“Thinking differently” is NewSpeak, for, Stop thinking, and submit to the Capitalist cult!
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 